Monthly Archives: October 2014

Introduction
This is the first of a series of letters on semantic freedom. One of the most important factors that makes us humans unique is our ability to communicate. If we claim that we are the dominant species on earth, then our ability to communicate must play a major role in making us dominant. The ability to communicate gives us phenomenal power.

The ability to communicate also gives some of us phenomenal power to control or manipulate others. We can also unwittingly put ourselves in the power of others by accepting their symbols without examination. Maybe some of us are prisoners of semantic symbols.

Semantic Rigidity, Flexibility, and Freedom
I describe “territorial gangsters” as individuals who use fraud, force, coercion, and terrorism to claim “jurisdiction” (so-called) over a geographic territory and/or the people who happen to be in that territory; so the former can control and dominate the latter and live like parasites or cannibals off the labor and products of the latter. [The notation – “jurisdiction (so-called)” – is to indicate that the very concept of “jurisdiction” is being challenged.]

It is to the advantage of territorial gangsters to trap their victims within a system of semantic rigidity. Territorial gangsters want their victims to use rigid concepts to formulate their thoughts. Thoughts have a profound influence on actions. Territorial gangsters want their victims to behave in a manner that increases the power, influence, and wealth of territorial gangsters.

A basic control mechanism is the concept of “law.” Some of the noises and scribbles that emanate from the mouths and pens of territorial gangsters must be projected or regarded as “the law” (so-called).

To grasp this phenomenon requires a basic semantic thinking skill: distinguishing between symbol and referent. [The referent is what the symbol refers to.] “Table” (the word or symbol) is a noise coming out of your mouth. The four-legged piece of furniture with a flat, horizontal top is the referent of the symbol “table.” One of the first things you learn in semantics is that “the map is not the territory” and “the menu is not the meal.” Whatever you say something is, it’s not that!

As a child, learning to speak, we were told, “this is a chair,” “this is a table,” “this is a book,” “that’s a tree,” etc. To achieve semantic flexibility and freedom we need to unlearn the identification between word and thing, symbol and referent. The four-legged piece of furniture with a flat, horizontal top is not a “table.” To the question “what is it then?” the answer is simply to point at it and remain silent – or to say “it is what it is.”

Consider the phenomenon of saying “A is B” – the four-legged piece of furniture with a flat, horizontal top (A) “is a table” (B). We’re equating or identifying one portion of the universe with another. We’re saying that a certain object is a noise. This is absurd. It’s an outright lie. It’s also vital to thought, knowledge, and communication that we use this lying mechanism!

Isn’t it interesting that arguably our greatest power – to think, know, and communicate – depends on a fundamental lie – equating or identifying one portion of the universe with another and saying, “this is a table”?!

The obvious question is, “so what?” In much thought, knowledge, and communication this phenomenon causes us no problems – particularly when the referent is a concrete object like a table, tree, or book. But what might happen in the case of words that don’t refer to physical objects, like “happiness” and “law” – what are their referents?

As long as we remain unaware of semantic identification (the failure to distinguish between symbol and referent), territorial gangsters will continue to hypnotize us into blindly accepting their symbols like “legal” and “illegal.” For example, I’m free to use whatever name whenever I want to for myself – provided I don’t use it to defraud anyone. [Of course, I’m not “Frederick Mann.” “Frederick Mann” is a noise from my mouth or a scribble from my pen.] Most people believe they have a “real name” (given by their parents) or a “legal name” (approved by the territorial gangsters). If they use some other name, it’s a “phony name.”

As long as we remain unaware of semantic identification, we will be hypnotized by territorial gangsters into blindly accepting their symbols: “law,” “legal,” illegal,” etc.

Next we need to question the notion that “words have meanings.” If a word has a “meaning,” then where is the “meaning?” Take the word “dog.” Is its “meaning” in the ink, or in the blank spaces within the ink? If the word “dog” is spoken, then where is its “meaning?” What does the “meaning” look like? Are their “meanings” in the dictionary – or just more words? What is the referent of the word “meaning?”

If words had meanings, surely we would be able to understand the words of an unfamiliar foreign language. If we heard an unfamiliar foreign language being spoken, would we not also hear the meaning of every word? If we read an unfamiliar foreign language, would we not also see the meaning of every word? If you can’t see or hear the meaning, then where is it?

But if words have no meaning, how do we communicate? Well, as best as I can establish, we have in our heads “patterns of brain-cell connections” or “neural patterns.” Associated with the word “table” there is in my head a neural pattern I describe as “a four-legged piece of furniture with a flat, horizontal top.” When I hear or read the word “table” it triggers or activates this neural pattern or “meaning” in my head. The referent of the word “meaning” is the presumed associated neural pattern in my head.

So what I’m saying is that words don’t have meanings, but people have meanings – for words they are familiar with – in the form of neural patterns in their brains. Take the Zulu word “ixaxa” – if you don’t know the word, you have no meaning for it – it doesn’t trigger or activate any neural pattern or meaning in your head (except “unknown word”) – you don’t have a meaning for it. Because I know some Zulu, the word “ixaxa” triggers in my head the neural pattern corresponding to that you have for the English word “frog.”

When I say something to you, I observe your response. From your response I judge whether you “understood” – that is, whether my words triggered or activated the appropriate neural patterns in your head. If I think my communication was unsuccessful, I repeat or rephrase it, or I say, “What I mean is…” I have no way of telling for sure that your meaning or neural pattern for “frog” is the same as mine. In two-way communication we often discover that two people have different meanings (and often multiple meanings) for the same word.

Practical Application
Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code (tax code of the Infernal Revenue Stealers) starts with the words, “Any person required under this title to pay any estimated tax or tax, or required by this title or by regulations made under authority thereof to make a return, keep any records, or supply any information…” So who is a “person required?” This article appeared in the August 1991 issue of The Connector:

“Patriot, Tom Hauert – charged with five counts of 7203 willful failure to file returns in March 1990 – put the prosecuting U.S. Attorney on the spot in Federal District Court, Chicago. Ill. At a hearing before the court on October 1st, 1990, Tom stated that he did not understand the charges. Tom read from the Internal Revenue Code the first three words of Section 7203, “Any person required.” Then he asked, “How is it established in this section that I am one of those persons required?” The judge read and reread that section, and finally admitted that he understood that Tom was asking for the statute that creates the determination of who is required. The judge said, “Mr. Prosecutor, you can provide a copy of that statute, can’t you?” At that point the prosecuting attorney started stammering and stuttering, and said he wasn’t familiar with that part of the Code, and the judge told him to find someone to help find it. Well, it’s now May 1991… and the government has not provided the information. For ten years Tom wrote many letters to the IRS, asking what statute made him liable? Neither the IRS, nor the government attorney has ever told him or shown him the statute that made/makes him liable. Could it be there is none? That’s correct, there isn’t any statute that makes a citizen within the fifty states liable. That’s why Congress said, “Our tax system is based on voluntary self-assessment.” So don’t gripe about high taxes if you voluntarily assess yourself.”

Most people living in the so-called “USA” automatically take it for granted that they are referents of the term “person required.” Tom Hauert didn’t. In a criminal case the judge has to ask the accused if he or she understands the charges. Mr. Hauert effectively said, “No. I don’t understand the charges because I don’t see how they could possibly apply to me. For the charges to apply to me, the prosecution will have to show that I am a “person required.”” It so happens that there’s nothing in the tax code that establishes that Mr. Hauert is a referent of the term (symbol) “person required.” End of court case.

I don’t recommend that anyone conduct their affairs so as to end up in court. Before such a court case the Infernal Revenue Stealers usually send letters. If these letters are appropriately responded to the Infernal Revenue Stealers will soon give up. Because of the quotas their officers have to meet and because there are so many “easy marks” they soon drop their efforts against informed citizens in order to pursue the “easy pickings.”

Mr. Hauert’s defense has a drawback. The Infernal Revenue Stealers can “lean” on the judge. If the judge doesn’t toe the line he or she can easily be put away on a trumped up tax charge, as happened to a Las Vegas judge a few years ago who was “too easy” on “tax protestors.” So the crooked judge’s answer to Mr. Hauert’s defense is to commit the accused for psychiatric observation – if he can’t understand the charges he must be insane

Some Principles

The way we use words has consequences.

Taking conscious responsibility for the meanings in your head puts you in a position of power.

Automatically accepting meanings from others – including implied meanings from dictionaries – puts you in a position of weakness.

Mr. Hauert could have said that he understood the charges and that he pleaded not guilty, in which case he would almost certainly have been a “dead duck.” But because he didn’t understand the charges the case never even got to the point where he had to plead. The words he used and how he used them had consequences. In his head Mr. Hauert had a meaning for the term “person required” that was very different from that commonly accepted. This fact put him in a position of power that rendered the prosecution and the judge helpless. Had he automatically accepted the generally held meaning of the term “person required” his position would have been much weaker and the prosecution and the judge would almost certainly have walked all over him.

Implications
Most of us have suffered from coercion meted out by territorial gangsters, including myself. What form does the coercion usually take? Has a territorial gangster ever pointed a gun at you or shot at you? Personally, the only way I’ve been coerced by territorial gangsters has been in the form of spoken or written words – and flashing lights.

What will happen if a critical percentage of people become semantically sophisticated, flexible, and free? What are the implications for freedom strategy? Should we beg the territorial gangsters to change their system? Or should we persuade people to stop believing the territorial gangsters? Should we persuade people to stop believing the territorial gangsters – examine and reject the automatic meanings people hold in their heads for the words the territorial gangsters use to control, dominate, and milk them? What power do territorial gangsters have if enough people laugh at their words?

If the system is changed, but people still believe that words are things and words have meanings – and they believe that the noises and scribbles emanating from the mouths and pens of territorial gangsters constitute “the law” (so-called) – will people still be the effect or potential effect of territorial gangsters?

Conversation in Brussels
One evening in 1985, sitting at a bar in Brussels with an alcoholic Irishman and a peaceful Anarchist after a game of squash, we got talking about “law.” The Irishman said something about the need to obey the law. I dramatically pulled my keys out of my pocket, held them up in the air above the counter, and dropped them. They fell onto the counter with a thud and a jingle.

“There’s only one kind of law, physical laws like the law of gravity,” I said.

“You’re wrong,” replied the Anarchist. Never before or since have I heard two words spoken in that manner. They were stated with total certainty, yet uttered softly and gently. They were stated in a manner that stopped the conversation. The final word on the subject had been spoken. No questions could be asked, no rejoinders offered. Part of the unspoken content of those two little words were: “Don’t say anything; go away and think.”

The Absurdity of “Human Law”
The two simple words of the Anarchist left a question in my mind that took two years to resolve. Of course, at the time of the brief conversation I had already shed the primitive superstition concerning “human law.” Several years before our brief conversation it had already become obvious to me that the notion that some of the noises and scribbles that emanate from the mouths and pens of politicians constitutes “the law” which must be obeyed, changed, or repealed, is a primitive superstition. (You may have to read the previous sentence several times.)

Sometimes we take certain things too much for granted with insufficient inspection. We utter a noise and someone thirty feet away jumps. It’s magical. A politician barks and we cower in fear – because the politician’s bark is the “law” and if we don’t obey, the politician’s policeman will come after us with a gun. There’s real primitive magic at work here: politician’s bark = policeman’s gun = the law = obedience, disobedience, punishment, begging to change the system, etc.

Words seem to have magical power. Consider the word “fuck.” Many people get emotional when they hear it. Imagine the effect of running into a church and shouting “fuck!” The neural patterns some people have for certain words include automatic emotional reactions! The power isn’t in the word, it’s in the neural pattern in your head. In the case of the words projected as “the law” (so-called), the power isn’t in the words, it’s in the neural patterns in your head.

At the time of the brief conversation with the Anarchist, realizing that “human law” is primitive superstition was kindergarten stuff to both of us. The difference between us was that the Anarchist had also relegated “physical law” (the way most people use the term) to primitive superstition while I still believed in it.

What About “Physical Law?”
Many scientists say the universe is “governed by laws.” But what kind of creatures are these supposed “laws” and how do they go about their business of “governing” the universe? Are they ghost-like critters with invisible hands that push or pull everything in the universe around. When I held my keys up in the air and let go, did the “law of gravity” grab my keys with its “invisible hand” and push them down onto the counter? I repeat, what kind of creatures are these supposed “laws” and how do they go about their business of “governing” the universe? Or, in other words, what is the referent of the symbol “law of gravity” and how does this referent act or behave? How does this referent cause or control anything?

More sophisticated scientists, when confronted with the above paragraph will say that we perceive regularities in the universe. Laws are descriptions of these regularities. Laws don’t govern or cause anything. Laws don’t even explain anything. They describe. Laws are human inventions. They appear in our heads and in our writings. There’s no such thing as the “law of gravity.” It’s a description, not a thing. It’s not a volitional entity that can “govern” anything. Maybe the whole idea that the universe is “governed” is quite absurd.

Note that I didn’t say there’s no such thing as gravity. A distinction is necessary between the phenomenon (gravity) and the description of the phenomenon (the law of gravity.) The reality of the phenomenon of gravity is beyond question. Otherwise I would always float like an astronaut in space!

Physical laws are descriptions that predict. Because we see regularities in the universe, we regard aspects of it as predictable. Laws are predictions.

The idea of “meaning” is closely related to prediction. When we say something “means” something, what we mean is that it enables us to predict something. For example, sailors say that a red sunset means good weather. These meanings are all neural patterns in our heads.

Law and Survival
The nature of law is very important to those seeking to advance civilization. If we believe that we are “governed” by all kinds of “laws” – human and physical – it renders us relatively helpless and powerless. Of course, we know that there are people who believe in “human law.” Some of these people carry guns. They may take our money or other property, and even jail or shoot us if we challenge the “authority” of their “law.” So, to survive and prosper, we must sometimes pretend to obey their “law.”

Our actions produce consequences. We are free to choose our actions. We are not nearly so free in choosing the consequences of our actions. We live in a world of people with neural patterns in their heads. The bureaucrats, police, and judges have neural patterns in their heads corresponding to words like “law.” They behave in accordance with their neural patterns, not ours. In choosing our actions we need to consider their neural patterns.

The Concept of “Country”
Now that we’ve achieved some semantic sophistication, flexibility, and freedom, we can examine the “country” concept. (Note that I mean “country” in its political sense, not when referring to rural areas or farmland.)

Most people regard a concept such as “country” as an absolute given. For them, a “country” is part of objective reality. So let’s introduce an additional semantic thinking skill: Is the referent objective or subjective? At first thought it might look as if the referents of the word “country” are objective. There is a territory – a geographical area – obviously concrete and objective. There are citizens – individual human beings – also obviously concrete and objective. Then there are borders – sometimes a river, sometimes a fence, sometimes a line on a map – partially concrete and objective, but not so concrete when it’s just a line on a map. There is also a common language (or several) – words with corresponding meanings in people’s heads – completely subjective (all meanings are subjective). Then there is a so-called “constitution” and “laws” – ink (words) on paper – completely subjective. There are buildings with bureaucrats, police with guns, courts and jails – concrete and objective. There is a flag – the cloth with a pattern on it is concrete and objective, but the meanings people have for the so-called “flag” are completely subjective. And there is usually a “military war machine” – concrete and objective, when we examine the soldiers and their armaments.

So, some of the referents are objective and some are subjective. Let me suggest that “territory” is really subjective. On what objective basis is a part of the earth’s surface regarded as a territory? (Likewise with the notion of a “border.”) What if some people (A) say there are four territories: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran – but others (B) say that there is a fifth territory: Kurdistan. (A) don’t recognize (B) as a country. But (B) – the Kurds – think of themselves as a country. They don’t recognize the maps which say that parts of their country belong to Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Different people have different opinions as to what constitutes “their countries.”

Consider the consequences of regarding the concept of (or commonly held meaning for) “country” as valid. The word “country” is part of the verbal arsenal used by territorial gangsters to control, dominate, and milk their victims.

Psychologically, the “country” concept is used extensively for brainwashing purposes. Economically, it is used for a multitude of parasitic, nefarious purposes; e.g.: the “customs” bureaucrats who extort huge sums of money in the form of “duties,” “tariffs,” “taxes,” etc. on “imports” and “exports.” (Note the subjective/false nature of the words “import” and “export.” Transporting goods from one location to another doesn’t really constitute “importing” or “exporting.”)

Then there’s the “requirement” that people have “passports” and “visas” to travel “in” and “out” of supposed “countries.” In The World Is My Country Garry Davis wrote:

“Papers give status, dignity and privilege to the issuing authority rather than to the bearer – although the opposite is generally assumed – and I believe that this is equally true in the case of passports, driver’s licenses, honorary degrees, permits to practice law, licenses for marriage… or even certificates of good health. In all such cases the individual unwittingly surrenders his right to assume command, status, or direction of himself in human terms by acknowledging and then accepting an outside authority’s right to grant these things to him.”

These things essentially attempt to make something (pretended “authorities”) out of nothing; hindering people’s rights such as the freedom to travel, and creating more opportunities for more territorial gangsters to extort more money on a regular basis.

But it doesn’t end there. In his Notes on Nationalism, written in 1945, George Orwell described another consequence:

“By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.” But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

The general acceptance of the “country” concept also results in racism, war, isolationism, retarded economies, etc. See also The Constitution of No Authority for a thorough explanation of why the “country” concept (particularly in its “legal” sense) is a hoax and a fraud.

Suppose there was no such word as “country” and no equivalent – how would that affect the power of territorial gangsters?

(A correspondent once wrote to me that he lives on Australia – by this he means that he lives on the land-mass or continent referred to as “Australia,” not “in” the pretended “country” called “(The Commonwealth of) Australia.” The names have a convenient use for distinguishing between different parts of the planet, and we might only keep them for this purpose.)

A Common Thinking Error
There is a common thinking error which takes the following form:

Someone proposes “A.”

A critic says, “A is B” (where there’s little or no relationship between A and B).

Then the critic says, “B is bad” or, “I don’t understand B.”

“Therefore,” the critic says, “A is bad” or, “I don’t understand A.”

Many politicians use this as a dirty trick to demonize their opponents. I call it the “sillygism.” Let me illustrate:

Some people do this inadvertently, simply because they don’t understand “A.” They may then innocently substitute their distorted “B” as a substitute for “A.” Then they comment on or criticize “B.”

This can bring about a tremendous waste of time. The person who said “A” may have to explain that he never said “B.” It may also be necessary to explain the difference between “A” and “B.”

The solution is to never accuse anyone of having said anything. Simply quote exactly what (s)he said or wrote – and then respond to that.

If you don’t understand what someone has said or written, then ask for clarification – quoting exactly what it is you want clarified.

I don’t know how widespread this sillygism thinking error is. I suspect it’s a trap most of us fall into from time to time. It particularly occurs as a prelude to getting upset. Many upsets follow the sillygism form:

Something happens or is said (A).

The “victim” thinks or says, “It means she doesn’t love/respect me… he insulted me… whatever” (B) – which may have little or nothing to do with A.

B is bad.

Therefore I’m upset by A.

For example, some readers may decide that what’s written here about this common thinking error – particularly calling it a “sillygism” – is “patronizing” or even “insulting.” As a result they may “get upset.”

Maybe, like words, events have no meaning. Maybe people create in their heads all the meaning there is. Maybe they use their own meanings or neural patterns to upset themselves.

How to Escape the Prison of Symbols
To the extent that the meanings or neural patterns in your brain are rigid, automatic, habitual, unexamined, or unconscious, you are a prisoner of symbols. Rigid, automatic, habitual, unexamined, or unconscious neural patterns limit your freedom of choice. When the symbol is flashed you react like a puppet – if you have a neural pattern associated with the symbol, and your neural pattern is rigid, automatic, habitual, unexamined, or unconscious. Rigid, automatic, habitual, unexamined, or unconscious neural patterns are not under your control. As a result, your behavior as a reaction to the symbols for which you have rigid, automatic, habitual, unexamined, or unconscious neural patterns, may also be out of your control. And out-of-control behavior is almost certainly guaranteed to not be in your best interests.

To escape from your prison of symbols you apply the semantic thinking skills proposed in this report:

Examine the nature of the referent to determine whether it is objective or subjective;

Examine your meanings to determine how they affect your power.

Beware of the sillygism.

You may also want to do some of the exercises from A Course in Miracles, published by Foundation for Inner Peace, PO Box 635, Tiburon, CA 94920. Here are some titles of exercises from Volume Two: Workbook for Students I particularly recommend:Lesson 1 – “Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything.”Lesson 2 – “I have given everything in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] all the meaning that it has for me.”Lesson 3 – “I do not understand anything I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place].”Lesson 4 – “These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place].”Lesson 5 – “I am never upset for the reason I think.”Lesson 6 – “I am upset because I see something that is not there.”Lesson 7 – “I see only the past.”Lesson 8 – “My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.”Lesson 9 – “I see nothing as it is now.”Lesson 10 – “My thoughts do not mean anything.”Lesson 11 – “My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.”Lesson 12 – “I am upset because I see a meaningless world.”Lesson 13 – “A meaningless world engenders fear.”Lesson 15 – “My thoughts are images that I have made.”Lesson 16 – “I have no neutral thoughts.”Lesson 17 – “I see no neutral things.”Lesson 20 – “I am determined to see.”Lesson 21 – “I am determined to see things differently.”Lesson 24 – “I do not perceive my own best interests.”Lesson 25 – “I do not know what anything is for.”Lesson 31 – “I am not the victim of the world I see.”Lesson 32 – “I have invented the world I see.”Lesson 33 – “There is another way of looking at the world.”

A Game Called “Countries”
There is a game called “Countries.” The game consists of subgames with names such as “U.S.A.,” “France,” “U.K.,” “Australia,” “China,” etc. Each subgame has its own “territory,” often “bordered” by rivers or seas, which is shown on a map with all the other “territories,” to define the area of each subgame, so all players “know” which subgame they are playing.

The pieces considered to be most important (joined in associations called “governments,” “monarchies,” etc.) make up the rules of their games as they go along. The rules are called “laws.” The “most important players” change the rules whenever they like. The scores of the games are kept with tokens called “money.”

The boards on which the games are played have good squares, neutral squares, and bad squares. If a piece lands on a good square, the player might win a million tokens or get a promotion and exchange his or her piece for a more important piece. If a piece lands on a neutral square, the player just continues as usual. If a piece lands on a bad square, the player might get sick or die, or might have “money” tokens or “property” “seized” by the “most important players,” or is locked up in “jail” by the “most important players.” Sometimes when two pieces land on the same square, they form a union called “marriage” – this could be good, neutral, or bad.

The “most important players” compel the players with pieces called “children” to move them into squares called “schools,” where the pieces are “educated” so they will learn that this game called “Countries” is the “only” game. The children of some subgames are also “taught” that their subgame is the best game in the world, and that other subgames are bad. Of course, they are also “educated” on how to play the game.

Sometimes the “most important players” organize their own subgame called “war.” The purpose of this subgame is to destroy as many pieces as possible. When a player’s piece is destroyed, the player is killed and buried. Sometimes these “war” games also involve taking over the subgame of others, so as to expand the “territory” of their own subgame.

The silly little game called “Countries” also has elements called “problems” that need to be “solved.” These “problems” are called names like: “terrorism,” “unemployment,” “inflation,” “depression,” “drug addiction,” “pollution,” “crime,” “suicide,” etc.

Practically all humans have been “educated,” throughout their lives, to believe that they must play the silly little game called “Countries,” and its silly little subgames like “U.S.A.,” “France,” “U.K.,” “Australia,” “China,” etc. And if they don’t like their silly little game, they must change their silly little game, for example, by begging “the most important players” to change some of the rules of their silly little game.

Horror of horrors! Humans are “educated” to believe that their silly little game is real life. They have no idea that what they are doing is just playing a silly, arbitrary, optional game, and that they can play many other games if they wake up. Is it justified to ask whether practically all humans are like characters in an Alice-in-Wonderland dream who never wake up?

Free Sovereign Individuals “jump out” of the silly little game (“the system”) to the maximum practical degree. They think and live freely. They create their own new games and make their own rules. Of course, there are “most important players” with guns and jails who try to force everyone else to play their silly little game. Free Sovereign Individuals apply freedom technology to play the games of their choice.

The ‘Big Lie’ Phenomenon
It is a principle of political propaganda that:

THE BIGGER THE LIE,
AND THE MORE OFTEN IT IS REPEATED,
THE MORE EASILY PEOPLE BELIEVE IT!

As Nietzsche wrote, “Everything the state says is a lie.” This essay sets out to demonstrate that everything about the pretended “state” is a lie – including the pretended “state” itself. It is a gigantic fraud, a hoax, a nothing.

Cognitive Dissonance
This essay may contradict some of your basic ideas about the world – even if you are a most advanced Thinker, Libertarian, or Anarchist. “Cognitive dissonance” refers to the intellectual disruption that is caused by new or unusual ideas that challenge some of your current basic ideas. Your challenge is to handle any cognitive dissonance that may be caused by this essay, and not to let it interfere with your integration of this information.

Brief Biographical Sketch Of Lysander Spooner
This brief biography is based on the chapter, “Lysander Spooner, Dissident Among Dissidents,” in the book Men Against The State by James J. Martin (Ralph Myles Publisher, Colorado Springs; 1970). I (Frederick Mann) first read The Constitution of no Authority (probably Spooner’s most famous essay) in 1976. It had a profound effect on my thinking. First it became clear to me that there is no legitimate country called “The United States of America” – it is a gigantic hoax, a fraud, a nothing. Next I realized that all other pretended “countries” in the world were also hoaxes, frauds, or nothings – there were hucksters, hoaxes, and believers. The people who call themselves “governments” are liars and impostors – Spooner’s essential message.

Lysander Spooner was born on January 19, 1808 in Athol, MA. He died in May, 1887 in Boston, MA. He grew up on a farm, which he left at age 25 to become a clerk in Worcester. Soon thereafter he started studying “law.” His first seven years as a lawyer were spent in Ohio.

Spooner became involved in the Freethought movement as a pamphleteer during the thirties. In 1836 he wrote, “all men of common sense disregard authority.” During the late 1830s he also became an ardent advocate for Free Banking and alternative currencies, and wrote extensively on these subjects over a period of thirty years.

In 1844 Spooner started his own postal service, the American Letter Mail Company, carrying letters between New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In 1845 his postal company was “outlawed” by “the government.” Benjamin Tucker called Spooner “the father of cheap postage in America.” (Tucker was one of the most influential early American Anarchists. He said, “Liberty, to be effective, must find its first application in the realm of economics.” James Martin devotes two chapters to Tucker in Men Against the State.)

Spooner opposed slavery. In 1845 and 1846 he published two booklets titled The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. Tucker described Spooner as “one of the profoundest political philosophers that ever added to the knowledge of mankind.”

Spooner was also an advocate of natural law or common law. In 1846 he published Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure. He wrote that it was a principle of natural law that every man was entitled to “all the fruits of his own labor.” He was a strong opponent of all violations of the right to make contracts, particularly the granting of monopolies by terrocrats (terrorist bureaucrats or coercive “government” agents).

In 1852 he published An Essay On The Trial By Jury. He asserted that there had never been a single legal jury trial in the United States since the adoption of the pretended “constitution.” No one has explained as well as Spooner, what the phrase “trial by jury” means.

During his career as a dissident, Spooner gradually became more radical. Early on, much of his economic, financial, and political criticism was based on the argument that various measures were unconstitutional. Later on, he started to expose the illegality of the pretended “constitution” itself. Soon after the Civil War he began publishing a series of pamphlets under the title No Treason. The final one appeared in 1870 and was subtitled The Constitution of No Authority.

In my opinion, Lysander Spooner was the greatest lawyer there has ever been.

Gulliver’s Travels And Alice In WonderlandGulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll can be regarded as introductions to the Spooner-insight.

In his Introduction to Gulliver’s Travels, Michael Foot wrote, “It is an attempt to tear off the mask of imposture from the world…”

The essence of the Spooner-insight is that all the political systems in his time (1869) were fraudulent impostures. This is as true today as it was in Spooner’s time.

The Spooner-InsightNote: In the rest of this essay, double quotation marks are used to invalidate the concept enclosed within quotation marks. For example, “constitution” indicates that the validity of the notion of a “U.S. Constitution” is being rejected. Sometimes ‘pretended’ is added to emphasize the rejection of the word, concept, or notion. It is vital that you understand this syntax (grammatical structure). Where, for example, ‘pretended “president”‘ is written, it means that there is no real president – the idea that there is a real president is being rejected. In other words, the person masquerading as “president” is an impostor and a liar.

The Spooner-insight may be the most challenging viewpoint of political systems you have been confronted with. It is vital that you think it through in all its details and implications.

Because the basic political notions have been powerfully imprinted in your brain, you may be faced with a formidable challenge. In effect, what you may have to do to drastically change what has been ‘burned into your brain’ all your life. Because the basic political notions are represented by physical patterns in your brain, you may have to think about the Spooner-insight for at least 21 days before it ‘sinks in.’

In order to fully understand the Spooner-insight, you will probably have to read this entire essay.

Eight Elements of the Spooner-Insight:

The pretended “U.S. constitution” has been a fraud and a hoax from the outset. It was never signed as a contract in any legal way by anyone. It never bound anyone. It was foisted on a naive, gullible, credulous populace.

Therefore, the pretended “United States of America” has been a fraud and a hoax from the outset. It is pure imagination or make-believe.

The pretended “government of the U.S.A.” has no legal authority whatsoever. It is a hoax and a fraud in its entirety.

All the people claiming to be “presidents,” “senators,” “representatives,” “secretaries,” “judges,” “generals,” “ambassadors,” etc. of the pretended “U.S.A.” are liars and impostors, whether they realize it or not. They are hucksters and hoaxers.

The pretended “laws” of the pretended “U.S.A.” are in reality no more than absurd noises and scribbles made by liars and impostors.

The same applies to all other pretended “states” and “countries” of the world. Their pretended “emperors,” “kings,” “queens,” “prime ministers,” etc. have all been liars and impostors all along. Likewise, all their pretended “laws” have in reality been no more than absurd noises and scribbles of liars and impostors.

The real rulers all along have been the major money lenders behind the scenes. The pretended “presidents,” “senators,” “representatives,” “secretaries,” “judges,” “generals,” “ambassadors,” “emperors,” “kings,” “queens,” “prime ministers,” etc. are mostly pawns of the money lenders.

In reality the whole world is ruled by secret bands of money lenders, tyrants, robbers, and murderers.

Objection: The Founding Fathers were honorable and sincere men with the best of intentions. The U.S. Constitution is a legitimate contract “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Response: The Founding Fathers were mostly lawyers. In their pretended “constitution” they misrepresented themselves as “We the people of the United States.” They arbitrarily excluded women and blacks. They knew common law (in use at the time), which requires that for a contract to be valid it needs to be entered into knowingly, voluntarily, and intentionally by all parties. For a written contract to be valid, it must be signed by all parties. The Declaration of Independence was signed as a mutual pledge between the signatories. Comparing the Declaration to the pretended “constitution” may lead you to the conclusion that the latter was a betrayal of the former. Some of the Founding Fathers realized that the “constitution” was a betrayal of liberty, so they formulated the “bill of rights” in an attempt to undo the betrayal. The pretended “bill of rights” became part of the pretended “constitution” nearly three years after the latter was signed. The pretended “constitution” has been a fraud and a hoax from the outset – and an abomination, particularly if compared to the Declaration of Independence.

How to Grasp and Integrate the Spooner-Insight:

Read this entire essay.

Don’t discuss this essay with just anyone. We have all been brainwashed since early childhood with political lies. They are burned into our brains. The whole population has been duped, hoodwinked, brainwashed. If you show this essay to others, most will tell you it is insane. They have been duped, hoodwinked, brainwashed.

Even if you are an advanced Libertarian or Anarchist thinker, you may gain important insights from this essay.

If necessary, re-read the eight elements of the Spooner-insight at least once a day for at least 21 days.

At times thoughts may come up like, “I must be crazy to even consider the Spooner-insight.” Don’t let these thoughts stop you from reprogramming your brain.

If necessary, re-read this entire essay from time to time.

Think about the implications of the Spooner-insight and how the implications affect what you think you need to do to increase your personal freedom, wealth, and power.

As Nietzsche wrote, “Everything the state says is a lie.” All our political systems are based on lies. The pretended “constitution” is a lie. The pretended “U.S.A.” is a lie. All other pretended “constitutions” and pretended “countries” are lies. The idea that Bill Clinton is “president of the U.S.A.” is a lie – whether he knows it or not. The same applies to all the other politicians in the world. It is all lies.

The whole population of earth is being continuously brainwashed by the media to believe the colossal political lies. You have to put in the effort to unbrainwash yourself and reprogram your mind. You have to do some serious thinking. You may have to think about the Spooner-insight for at least 21 days to let it ‘sink in.’

The Constitution of No Authority

by Lysander Spooner (edited)

IWho is Bound by the Pretended “Constitution”?

The “constitution” (pretended) has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. [This essay was written in 1869.] And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the pretended “constitution,” so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument [the pretended “constitution”] does not purport to be an agreement between anybody but “the people” then existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves. Let us see. Its language is:

“We, the people of the United States [that is, the people then existing in the pretended “United States”], in order to form a more perfect union, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It is plain, in the first place, that this language, as an agreement, purports to be only what it at most really was, viz., a contract between the people then existing; and, of necessity, binding, as a contract, only upon those then existing. In the second place, the language neither expresses nor implies that they had any intention or desire, nor that they imagined they had any right or power, to bind their posterity to live under it. It does not say that their posterity will, shall, or must live under it. It only says, in effect, that their hopes and motives in adopting it were that it might prove useful to their posterity, as well as to themselves, by promoting their union, safety, tranquility, liberty, etc.

Legally speaking, therefore, there is nothing in the pretended “constitution” that professes or attempts to bind the posterity of those who established it. If, then, those who established the pretended “constitution,” had no power to bind, and did not attempt to bind their posterity, the question arises, whether their posterity have bound themselves. If they have done so, they can have done so in only one or both of these two ways, viz., by voting, and paying taxes.

IIDoes Voting Imply Support of the Pretended “Constitution”?

Let us consider these two matters, voting and tax paying, separately; and first, voting. All the voting that has ever taken place under the pretended “constitution” has been of such a kind that it not only did not pledge the whole people to support the pretended “constitution,” but it did not even pledge any one of them to do so, as the following considerations show.

In the very nature of things, the act of voting could bind nobody but the actual voters.(Incidentally, due to the property qualifications required, it is probable that, during the first twenty or thirty years under the pretended “constitution,” not more than one-tenth, fifteenth, or perhaps twentieth of the whole population (black and white, men, women, and minors) were permitted to vote. Consequently, so far as voting was concerned, not more than one-tenth, fifteenth, or twentieth of those then existing, could have incurred any obligation to support the pretended “constitution.”)

Many never vote at all. Many vote only once in two, three, five, or ten years, in periods of great excitement. No one, by voting, can be said to pledge himself for any longer period than that for which he votes. If, for example, I vote for an officer who is to hold his office for only a year, I cannot be said to have thereby pledged myself to support the pretended “constitution” beyond that term.

It cannot be said that, by voting, a man pledges himself to support the pretended “constitution,” unless the act of voting be a perfectly voluntary one on his part. Yet the act of voting cannot properly be called a voluntary one on the part of any very large number of those who do vote. It is rather a measure of necessity imposed upon them by others, than one of their own choice. In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers (masquerading as a “government”) that he cannot resist; terrocrats (terrorist bureaucrats or coercive “government” agents) who force him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot – which is a mere substitute for the bullet – because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive “government” terrocrats in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the terrocrats themselves, that crush them, or their pretended “constitution,” was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to.As we can have no legal knowledge as to who votes from choice, and who from the necessity thus forced upon him, we can have no legal knowledge, as to any particular individual, that he voted from choice; or consequently, that by voting, he consented, or pledged himself, to support any pretended “constitution,” or the terrocrats who use it as a shield to “justify” their plunder and murder. Legally speaking, therefore, the act of voting utterly fails to pledge anyone to support any pretended “constitution.” It utterly fails to prove that the “authority” or “jurisdiction” (pretended) of any terrocrats rest upon the voluntary support of anyone. On general principles of law and reason, it cannot be said that any terrocrats have any voluntary supporters at all, until it can be distinctly shown precisely who their voluntary supporters are.

As taxation is made compulsory on all, whether they vote or not, a large proportion of those who vote, no doubt do so to prevent their own money being used against themselves; when, in fact, they would have gladly abstained from voting, if they could thereby have saved themselves from taxation alone, to say nothing of being saved from all the other usurpations and tyrannies of terrocrats. To take a man’s property without his consent, and then to infer his consent because he attempts, by voting, to prevent that property from being forcibly taken from him and used to his injury, is a very insufficient proof of his consent to support the pretended “constitution.” It is, in fact, no proof at all.

At nearly all elections, votes are given for various candidates for the same office. Those who vote for the unsuccessful candidates cannot properly be said to have voted to sustain the pretended “constitution.” They may, with more reason, be supposed to have voted, not to support the pretended “constitution,” but specially to prevent the tyranny which they anticipate the successful candidate intends to practice upon them under color of the pretended “constitution”; and therefore may reasonably be supposed to have voted against the pretended “constitution” itself. This supposition is the more reasonable, inasmuch as such voting is the only mode given to them of expressing their dissent to the pretended “constitution.”

Many votes are usually given for candidates who have no prospects of success. Those who give such votes may reasonably be supposed to have voted as they did, with special intention, not to support, but to obstruct the execution of, the pretended “constitution.”

As all the different votes are given secretly (by secret ballot), there is no legal means of knowing, from the votes themselves, who votes for, and who against, the pretended “constitution.” Therefore, voting affords no legal evidence that any particular individual supports the pretended “constitution.” And where there can be no legal evidence that any particular individual supports the pretended “constitution,” it cannot be legally said that anybody supports it at all. It is clearly impossible to have any legal proof of the intentions of large numbers of men, where there can be no legal proof of the intentions of any particular one of them.

There being no legal proof of any man’s intentions, in voting, we can only conjecture them. Men’s voluntary support of the pretended “constitution” is doubtless, in most cases, wholly contingent upon the question whether, by means of the pretended “constitution,” they can make themselves masters, or be made slaves. Such contingent consent as that is, in law and reason, no consent at all.

As everybody who supports the pretended “constitution” by voting (if there are any such) does so secretly (by secret ballot), and in a way to avoid all personal responsibility for the act of his agents or representatives, it cannot legally or reasonably be said that anybody at all supports the pretended “constitution” by voting. No man can reasonably or legally be said to do such a thing as to assent to, or support, the pretended “constitution,” unless he does it openly, and in a way to make himself personally responsible for the acts of his agents, so long as they act within the limits of the power he delegates to them.

As all voting is secret (by secret ballot), and as all secret “governments” (pretended) are necessarily only secret bands of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, the general fact that terrocrats are voted for, does nothing towards proving that “the people of the United States,” or any one of them, voluntarily supports the pretended “constitution.”

For all the reasons that have now been given, voting furnishes no legal evidence as to who the particular individuals are (if there are any), who voluntarily support the pretended “constitution.” It therefore furnishes no legal evidence that anybody supports it voluntarily.

So far, therefore, as voting is concerned, the pretended “constitution,” legally speaking, has no supporters at all. And, as a matter of fact, there is not the slightest probability that the pretended “constitution” has a single legitimate supporter in the country. That is to say, there is not the slightest probability that there is a single man in the country, who both understands what the pretended “constitution” really is, and sincerely supports it for what it really is.

The ostensible supporters of the pretended “constitution,” like the ostensible supporters of most terrocrats, are made up of three classes, viz.:

Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see terrocrats as people they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth.

Dupes – a large class, no doubt – each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in enslaving, robbing, and murdering others, that others have in enslaving, robbing, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a “free man,” a “sovereign”; that this is “a free government,” “a government of equal rights,” “the best government on earth,” and such like absurdities.

A class who have some appreciation of the evils of terrocrats, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change.

IIIDoes Paying Taxes Imply Support of the Pretended “Constitution”?

The payment of taxes, being compulsory, of course furnishes no evidence that anyone voluntarily supports the pretended “constitution” (or any supposed “government” under it), as the following considerations show.

It is true that the the theory of our pretended “constitution” is that all our taxes are paid voluntarily; that our terrocrats operate a “mutual insurance company,” voluntarily entered into by the people with each other; that each man makes a free and purely voluntary contract with all others who are parties to the pretended “constitution,” to pay so much money for so much protection, the same as he does with any other insurance company; and that he is just as free not to be protected, and not to pay tax, as he is to pay a tax, and be protected. But this theory of our terrocrats is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that our terrocrats, like highwaymen, say to a man: “Your money, or your life.” And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.Terrocrats do not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of “protection.” He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest and pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a “rebel,” a “traitor,” and an “enemy” to your “country,” and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his “authority” or “jurisdiction,” or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.The proceedings of those tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who call themselves “the government,” are directly the opposite of these of the single highwayman.

Still another reason why the payment of taxes implies no consent, or pledge, to support the pretended “constitution” or the pretended “government,” is that the taxpayer does not know, and has no means of knowing, who the particular terrocrats are, who have taken upon themselves the title of “the government,” and who assume to “protect” him, and demand payment of him, without his having ever made any contract with them. To him “the government” is a myth, an abstraction, an incorporality, with which he can make no contract, and to which he can give no consent, and make no pledge. He knows it only through its pretended agents. “The government” itself he never sees.

Not knowing who the particular individuals are, who call themselves “the government,” the taxpayer does not know whom he pays his taxes to. All he knows is that a man comes to him, representing himself to be the agent of “the government” – that is, the agent of a secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who have taken to themselves the title of “the government,” and have determined to jail or kill anybody who refuses to give them whatever money they demand. To save his life, he gives up his money to this agent. But as the agent does not make his principals individually known to the taxpayer, the latter, after he has given up his money, knows no more who are “the government” – that is who were the robbers – than he did before. To say, therefore, that by giving up his money to their agent, he entered into a voluntary contract with them, that he pledges himself to obey them, to support them, and to give them whatever money they should demand of him in the future, is simply ridiculous.

All political power, as it is called, rests practically upon this matter of money. Any number of scoundrels, having money enough to start with, can establish themselves as a “government” (pretended); because, with money, they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort more money; and also compel general obedience to their will. It is with pretended “government,” as Caesar said it was in war, that money and soldiers mutually supported each other; that with money he could hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort more money. So these villains, who call themselves “governments,” well understand that their power rests primarily upon money. With money they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. And, when their “authority” or “jurisdiction” (pretended) are denied, the first use they always make of money, is to hire soldiers to kill or subdue all who refuse them more money. For this reason, whoever desires liberty, should understand these vital facts, viz.:(a) That every man who puts money into the hands of terrocrats (who masquerade as “government”), puts into their hands a sword which will be used against himself, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection of their arbitrary will.(b) That those who will take his money, without his consent, in the first place, will use it for his further robbery and enslavement, if he presumes to resists their demands in the future.(c) That it is a perfect absurdity to suppose that any body of men would ever take a man’s money without his consent, for any such object as they profess to take it for, viz., that of protecting him; for why should they wish to protect him, if he does not wish them to do so? To suppose that they would do so, is just as absurd as it would be to suppose that they would take his money without his consent, for the purpose of buying food or clothing for him, when he did not want it.

(d) If a man wants protection, he is competent to make his own bargains for it; and nobody has any occasion to rob him, in order to “protect” him against his will.

(e) That the only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in their keeping their money in their own pockets, until they have assurances, perfectly satisfactory to themselves, that it will be used as they wish it to be used, for their benefit, and not for their injury.

(f) That no criminals (whether they call themselves “government” or not), can be trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, for as long as they depend on extortion, rather than voluntary support.

These facts are all so vital and so self-evident, that it cannot reasonably be supposed that anyone will voluntarily pay money to the terrocrats who masquerade as “the government,” for the purpose of securing their protection, unless he first makes an explicit and purely voluntary contract with them for that purpose.

It is perfectly evident, therefore, that neither such voting, nor such payment of taxes, as actually takes place, proves anybody’s consent, or obligation, to support the pretended “constitution.” Consequently we have no evidence at all that the supposed “constitution” is binding upon anybody, or that anybody is under any contract or obligation whatever to support it. And nobody is under any obligation to support it.

IVContracts Must Be Signed

The pretended “constitution” not only binds nobody now, but it never did bind anybody. It never bound anybody, because it was never agreed to by anybody in such a manner as to make it, on general principles of law and reason, binding upon him.

It is a general principle of law and reason, that a written instrument binds no one until he has signed it. This principle is so inflexible a one, that even if a man is unable to write his name, he must still “make his mark,” before he is bound by any contract. This custom was established ages ago, when few men could write their names; when a clerk – that is, a man who could write – was so rare and valuable a person, that even if he were guilty of high crimes, he was entitled to pardon, on the ground that the public could not afford to lose his services. Even at that time, a written contract must be signed; and men who could not write, either “made their mark,” or signed their contracts by stamping their seals upon wax affixed to the parchment on which their contracts were written. Hence the custom of affixing seals, that has continued to this time.

The laws holds, and reason declares, that if a written instrument is not signed, the presumption must be that the party to be bound by it, did not choose to sign it, or to bind himself by it. And law and reason both give him until the last moment, in which to decide whether he will sign it, or not. Just as with a written contract, a man must not be compelled to enter into any unwritten (verbal) contract. Besides a written contract providing evidence of there being a contract; until it is written, he may not know its precise legal meaning. And when it is written, and he has had the opportunity to satisfy himself of its precise legal meaning, he is then expected to decide, and not before, whether he will agree to it or not. And if he do not then sign it, his reason is supposed to be, that he does not choose to enter into such a contract. The fact that the instrument was written for him to sign, or with the hope that he would sign it, goes for nothing.

Where would be the end of fraud and litigation, if one party could bring into court a written instrument, without any signature, and claim to have it enforced, upon the ground that it was written for another man to sign? that this other man had promised to sign it? that he ought to have signed it? that he had had the opportunity to sign it, if he would? but that he had refused or neglected to do so? Yet that is the most that could ever be said of the pretended “constitution.” The very men who drafted it, never signed it in any way to bind themselves by it, as a contract. And not one of them probably ever would have signed it in any way to bind himself by it, as a contract. The impostor “judges,” who profess to derive all their supposed “authority” from the pretended “constitution” – from an instrument that nobody ever signed – would spurn any other instrument, not signed, that should be brought before them for adjudication.

Moreover, a written instrument must, in law and reason, not only be signed, but must also be delivered to the party (or to some one for him), in whose favor it is made, before it can bind the party making it. The signing is of no effect, unless the instrument be also delivered. And a party is at perfect liberty to refuse to deliver a written instrument, after he has signed it. (When a signed contract is not delivered, there is no communication from one party to the other that the contract has been agreed to and executed, and the other party has no proof to the contrary. It is as ineffectual as if it was never signed.) The pretended “constitution” was not only never signed by anybody, but it was never delivered by anybody, or to anybody’s agent or attorney. It can therefore be of no more validity as a contract, than can any other instrument that was never signed or delivered.

V

As further evidence of the general sense of mankind, as to the practical necessity there is that all men’s important contracts, especially those of a permanent nature, should be both written and signed, the following facts are pertinent.

For nearly two hundred years – that is, since 1677 – there has been on the statute book of England, and the same, in substance, if not precisely in letter, has been re-enacted, and is now in force, in nearly or quite all the States of this Union, a statute, the general object of which is to declare that no action shall be brought to enforce contracts of the more important class, unless they are put in writing, and signed by the parties to be held chargeable upon them. [At this point there is a footnote listing 34 states whose statute books Spooner had examined, all of which had variations of this English statute; the footnote also quotes part of the Massachussetts statute.]

The principle of the statute, be it observed, is, not merely that written contracts shall be signed, but also that all contracts, except for those specially exempted – generally those that are for small amounts, and are to remain in force for but a short time – shall be both written and signed.

The reason of the statute, on this point, is, that it is now so easy a thing for men to put their contracts in writing, and sign them, and their failure to do so opens the door to so much doubt, fraud, and litigation, that men who neglect to have their contracts – of any considerable importance – written and signed, ought not to have the benefit of courts of justice to enforce them. And this reason is a wise one; and that experience has confirmed its wisdom and necessity, is demonstrated by the fact that it has been acted upon in England for nearly two hundred years, and has been so nearly universally adopted in this country, and that nobody thinks of repealing it.

We all know, too, how careful most men are to have their contracts written and signed, even when this statute does not require it. For example, most men, if they have money due them, of no larger amount than five or ten dollars, are careful to take a note for it. If they buy even a small bill of goods, paying for it at the time of delivery, they take a receipted bill for it. If they pay a small balance of a book account, or any other small debt previously contracted, they take a written receipt for it.

Furthermore, the law everywhere (probably) in our country, as well as in England, requires that a large class of contracts, such as wills, deeds, etc., shall not only be written and signed, but also sealed, witnessed, and acknowledged. And in the case of married women conveying their rights in real estate, the law, in many States, requires that the women shall be examined separate and apart from their husbands, and declare that they sign their contracts free of any fear or compulsion of their husbands.

Such are some of the precautions which the laws require, and which individuals – from the motives of common prudence, even in cases not required by law – take, to put their contracts in writing, and have them signed, and, to guard against all uncertainties and controversies in regard to their meaning and validity. And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract – the pretended “constitution” – made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see. And of those who ever have read it, or ever will read it, scarcely any two, perhaps no two, have ever agreed, or ever will agree, as to what it means.

Moreover, this supposed “contract,” which would not be received in any court of justice sitting under its supposed “authority,” if offered to prove a debt of five dollars, is one by which – as it is generally interpreted by those who pretend to “administer” it – all men, women, and children throughout the country, and through all time, surrender not only their property, but also their liberties, and even their lives, into the hands of men who by this supposed “contract,” are expressly made wholly irresponsible for their disposal of them. And we are so insane, or so wicked, as to destroy property and lives without limit, in fighting to compel men to fulfill a supposed “contract,” which, inasmuch as it has never been signed by anybody, is, on general principles of law and reason, the merest waste paper, binding upon nobody, fit only to be thrown into the fire; or, if preserved, preserved only to serve as a witness and a warning of the folly and wickedness of mankind.

VIIrresponsible Power Derived from the Pretended “Constitution”

It is no exaggeration, but a literal truth, to say that, by the pretended “constitution” – not as I interpret it, but as it is interpreted by those who pretend to “administer” it – the properties, liberties, and lives of the entire people of the supposed “United States” are surrendered unreservedly into the hands of men who, it is provided by the pretended “constitution” itself, shall never be “questioned” as to any disposal they make of them. Thus the pretended “constitution” (Art. I, Sec. 6) provides that, “for any speech or debate (or vote), in either house, they (the pretended “senators” and “representatives”) shall not be questioned in any other place.” The whole pretended “law-making power” is given to these pretended “senators” and “representatives” (when acting by a two-thirds vote – and this two-thirds vote may be but two-thirds of a quorum; that is, two-thirds of a majority, instead of two-thirds of the whole); and this provision protects them from all responsibility for the pretended “laws” they make.

The pretended “constitution” also enables them to secure the execution of all their supposed “laws,” by giving them power to withhold the salaries of, and to impeach and remove, all “judicial and executive officers,” who refuse to execute them. Thus the whole power of the gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers who masquerade as “government” is in their hands, and they are made utterly irresponsible for the use they make of it. What is this but absolute, irresponsible power?

It is no answer to this view of the case to say that these men are under pretended “oath” to use their power only within certain limits; for what care they, or what should they care, for pretended “oaths” and limits, when it is expressly provided in the pretended “constitution” itself, that they shall never be “questioned,” or held to any responsibility whatever, for violating their pretended “oaths,” or transgressing those limits.

Neither is it any answer to this view of the case to say that the particular individuals holding this irresponsible power can be changed once in two or six years; for the power of each set of men is absolute during the term for which they hold it; and when they can hold it no longer, they are succeeded only by men whose power will be equally absolute and irresponsible.

Neither is it any answer to this view of the case to say that the men holding this absolute, irresponsible power, must be men chosen by the people (or portions of them) to hold it. A man is nonetheless a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because they are permitted to periodically choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and irresponsible. And of what appreciable value is it to any man, as an individual, that he is allowed a voice in choosing these public masters? His voice is only one of several millions.

The right of absolute and irresponsible dominion is the right of property, and the right of property is the right of absolute, irresponsible dominion. The two are identical; the one necessarily implying the other. Neither can exist without the other. If, therefore, the individuals who pretend to constitute the pretended “congress,” have the absolute and irresponsible “law-making power,” which the pretended “constitution” – according to their interpretation of it – gives them, it can only be because they own us as property. If they own us as property, they are our masters, and their will is our “law.” If they do not own us as property, they are not our masters, and their will, as such, is of no “authority” over us.

But these men who claim and exercise this absolute and irresponsible dominion over us, dare not be consistent, and claim either to be our masters, or to own us as property. They say they are only our servants, agents, attorneys, and representatives. But this declaration involves an absurdity, a contradiction. No man can be my servant, agent, attorney, or representative, and be, at the same time, uncontrollable by me, and irresponsible to me for his acts. It is of no importance that I appointed him, and put all power in his hands. If I made him uncontrollable by me, and irresponsible to me, he is no longer my servant, agent, attorney, or representative. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over my property, I gave him the property. If I gave him absolute, irresponsible power over myself, I made him my master, and gave myself to him as a slave. And it is of no importance whether I called him master or servant, owner or agent. The only question is, what power did I put into his hands? Was it an absolute and irresponsible one? or a limited and responsible one?

For still another reason they are neither our servants, agents, attorneys, or representatives. And that reason is, that we do not make ourselves responsible for their acts. If a man is my servant, agent, or attorney, I necessarily make myself responsible for all his acts done within the limits of the power I have entrusted to him. If I have entrusted him, as my agent, with either absolute power, or any power at all, over the persons or properties of other men than myself, I thereby necessarily make myself responsible to those other persons for any injuries he may do them, so long as he acts within the limits of the power I have granted him. But no individual who may be injured in his person or property by the acts of the individuals who pretend to constitute the pretended “congress,” can come to the individual electors, and hold them responsible for these acts of their pretended agents or representatives. This fact proves that these pretended agents of the people, of everybody, are really the agents of nobody.

If, then, nobody is individually responsible for the acts of the members who pretend to constitute the pretended “congress,” then these members are nobody’s agents. And if they are nobody’s agents, they are themselves individually responsible for their own acts, and for the acts of all whom they employ. And the “authority” they are exercising is simply their own individual “authority”; and, by the law of nature – the highest of all laws – anybody injured by their acts, anybody who is deprived by them of his property or his liberty, has the same right to hold them individually responsible, that he has to hold any other trespasser individually responsible. He has the same right to resist them, and their agents, that he has to resist any other trespassers or offenders.

VII

It is plain, then, that on general principles of law and reason – such principles as we all act upon in courts of justice and in common life – the pretended “constitution” is no contract; that it binds nobody, and never did bind anybody; and that all those who pretend to act by its “authority,” are really acting without any legitimate authority at all; that on general principles of law and reason, they are mere usurpers, and that everybody not only has the right, but is morally bound to treat them as such.

If some people wish to establish and maintain such a “government,” as the pretended “constitution” describes, there is no reason in the world why they should not sign the instrument itself, and thus make known their wishes in an open, authentic manner; in such manner as the common sense and experience of mankind have shown to be reasonable and necessary in such cases; and in such manner as to make themselves (as they ought to do) individually responsible for the acts of their pretended “government.” But no one has ever been asked to sign it. And the only reason why they have never been asked to sign it, is that it is known that they never would sign it; that they were neither such fools nor knaves as they must needs be to be willing to sign it; that (at least as it has been practically interpreted) it is not what any sensible and honest man wants for himself; nor such as he has any right to impose upon others. It is, to all moral intents and purposes, as destitute of obligation as the compacts which thieves, robbers, and pirates enter into with each other, but never sign.

If any considerable number of people believe the pretended “constitution” to be good, why do they not sign it themselves, and make laws for, and administer them upon, each other, leaving all other persons (who do not interfere with them) in peace? Until they have tried the experiment for themselves, how can they have the gall to impose their pretended “constitution” upon, or even to recommend it to, others? Plainly the reason for such absurd and inconsistent conduct is that they want the pretended “constitution,” not solely for any honest or legitimate use it can be to themselves or others, but for the dishonest and illegitimate power it gives them over the persons and properties of others. It is for this latter reason, that they eulogize the pretended “constitution,” that they exhort the gullible to revere it, that they expend so much money and blood to sustain it.

VIIIThe Pretended “Authority” of Pretended “Government”

The pretended “constitution” itself, then, being of no authority, on what authority does the pretended “government” practically rest? On what ground can those who pretend to “administer” it, claim the right to seize men’s property, to restrain them of their natural liberty of action, industry, and trade, and to punish, or even kill, all who deny their supposed “authority” to dispose of men’s properties, liberties, and lives at their pleasure or discretion?

The most they can say, in answer to this question, is, that some half, two-thirds, or three-fourths, of the male adults of the country have a tacit understanding that they will maintain a pretended “government” under the pretended “constitution”; that they will select, by ballot, the persons to administer it; and that those persons who may receive a majority, or a plurality, of their ballots, shall act as their representatives, and administer the pretended “constitution” in their name, and by their authority.

But this tacit understanding (admitting it to exist) cannot at all justify the conclusion drawn from it. A tacit understanding between A, B, and C, that they will, by ballot, depute D as their agent, to deprive me of my property, liberty, or life, cannot at all authorize D to do so. He is none the less a tyrant, robber, and murderer, because he claims to act as their agent, than he would be if he avowedly acted on his own responsibility alone.

Neither am I bound to recognize him as their agent, nor can he legitimately claim to be their agent, when he brings no written authority from them accrediting him as such. I am under no obligation to take his word as to who his principals may be, or whether he has any. Bringing no credentials, I have a right to say he has no such authority even as he claims to have, and that he is therefore intending to rob, enslave, or murder me on his own account.

This tacit understanding, therefore, among the voters of the country, amounts to nothing as an authority to their agents. Neither do the ballots by which they select their agents, avail any more than does their tacit understanding; for their ballots are given in secret, and therefore in a way to avoid any personal responsibility for the acts of their agents.

No body of men can be said to authorize a man to act as their agent, to the injury of a third person, unless they do it in so open and authentic a manner as to make themselves personally responsible for his acts. None of the voters in this country appoint their political agents in any open, authentic manner, or in any manner to make themselves responsible for their acts. Therefore these pretended agents cannot legitimately claim to be really agents. Somebody must be responsible for the acts of these pretended agents; and if they cannot show any open and authentic credentials from their principals, they cannot, in law or reason, be said to have any principals. The maxim applies here, that what does not appear, does not exist. If they can show no principal, they have none.

But even these pretended agents do not themselves know who their pretended principals are. These latter act in secret; for acting by secret ballot is acting in secret as much as if they were to meet in secret conclave in the darkness of the night. And they are personally as much unknown to the agents they select, as they are to others. No pretended agent therefore can ever know by whose ballots he is selected, or consequently who his real principals are. Not knowing who his principals are, he has no right to say that he has any. He can, at most, say only that he is the agent of a secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who are bound by that faith which prevails among confederates in crime, to stand by him, if his acts, done in their name, shall be resisted.

Men honestly engaged in attempting to establish justice in the world, have no occasion thus to act in secret; or to appoint agents to do acts for which they (the principals) are not willing to be personally responsible.

The secret ballot makes a secret tyranny, a secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers. Open despotism is better than this. The single despot stands out in the face of all men, and says: “I am the state; my will is law; I am your master; I take the responsibility of my acts; the only arbiter I acknowledge is the sword; if any one denies my right, let him try conclusions with me.”

But a secret tyranny is little less than a tyranny of assassins. Under it, a man knows not who his tyrants are, until they have struck, and perhaps not then. He may guess, beforehand, as to some of his immediate neighbors. But he really knows nothing with certainty. The man to whom he would most naturally fly for protection, may prove an enemy, when the time of trial comes.

This is the kind of tyranny we have; and it is the only one we are likely to have, until men are ready to say: “We will consent to no constitution, except such an one as we are neither ashamed nor afraid to sign; and we will authorize no agents or representatives to do anything in our name which we are not willing to be personally responsible for.”

IXThe Secret Ballot

What is the motive behind the secret ballot? This, and only this: Like other confederates in crime, those who use it are not friends, but enemies, and they are afraid to be known, and to have their individual doings known, even to each other. They can contrive to bring about a sufficient understanding to enable them to act in concert against other persons; but beyond this they have no confidence, and no friendship, among themselves. In fact, they are engaged quite as much in schemes for plundering each other, as in plundering those who are not of them. And it is perfectly well understood among them that the strongest party among them will, in certain contingencies, murder each other by the hundreds of thousands (as they lately did do) to accomplish their purposes against each other. Hence they dare not be known, and have their individual doings known, even to each other. And this is avowedly the only reason for the ballot: for a secret tyranny; a tyranny by secret bands of tyrants, robbers, and murderers. And we are insane enough to call this liberty! To be a member of this secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers is esteemed a privilege and an honor! Without this privilege, a man is considered a slave; but with it a free man! With it he is considered a free man, because he has the same power to secretly (by secret ballot) procure the robbery, enslavement, and murder of another man, and that other man has to procure his robbery, enslavement, and murder. And this they call equal rights!

If any number of men, many or few, claim the right to “govern” the people of this country, let them make and sign an open compact with each other to do so. Let them thus make themselves individually known to those whom they propose to “govern.” And let them thus openly take the legitimate responsibility of their acts. How many of those who now support the pretended “constitution,” will ever do this? How many will ever dare openly proclaim their right to “govern”?, or take the legitimate responsibility for their acts? Not one!

XThe Pretended “Government” is a Hoax

It is obvious that, on general principles of law and reason, there is no such thing as a “government,” created by, or resting upon, any consent, compact, or agreement of “the people of the United States” with each other; that what we have is a tyranny, composed of only a small number of individuals, who act in concert, and call themselves by the several names of “senators,” “representatives,” “presidents,” “judges,” “marshalls,” “treasurers,” “collectors,” “generals,” “colonels,” “captains,” etc., etc.

On general principles of law and reason, it is of no importance whatever, that those few individuals profess to be the agents and representatives of “the people of the United States”; since they can show no credentials from the people themselves; they were never appointed as agents or representatives in any open, authentic manner, they do not themselves know, and have no means of knowing, and cannot prove, who their principals (as they call them) are individually; and consequently cannot, in law or reason, be said to have any principals at all.

[The very idea that they could be “representatives,” is in itself utterly absurd, in fact impossible. They claim that one person serves as a “representative” for all of the people in a particular area – yet it should be blatantly obvious that one person cannot possibly represent all of the different, even conflicting, views – from a few thousand to millions, since no-one thinks identically to anyone else – in just one view that ends up being presented and applied to all by a single pretended “representative,” and which would also be affected by his or her biases.]

It is obvious, too, that if these alleged principals ever did appoint these pretended “agents,” or “representatives,” they appointed them secretly (by secret ballot), and in a way to avoid all personal responsibility for their acts; that, at most, these alleged principals put these pretended agents forward for the most criminal purposes, viz.: to plunder the people of their property, and restrain them of their liberty; and that the only “authority” that these alleged principals have for so doing, is simply a tacit understanding among themselves that they will imprison, shoot, or hang every man who resists the exactions and restraints which their agents or representatives may impose upon them.

Thus it is obvious that what we have is a tyranny, made up of these professed agents or representatives of a secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who, to cover up, or gloss over, their robberies and murders, have taken to themselves the title of “the people of the United States”; and who, on the pretense of being “the people of the United States,” assert their right to subject to their dominion, and to control and dispose of at their pleasure, all property and persons found in the country.

XIMeaningless “Oaths” Given to the Winds

On general principles of law and reason, the pretended “oaths” which these pretended agents of the people take to support and uphold the pretended “constitution,” are of no validity or obligation. And why? For this, if for no other reason, viz., that they are given to nobody. There is no “privity” (as the lawyers say) – that is, no mutual recognition, consent, and agreement – between those who take these pretended “oaths,” and any other persons.

If I go upon Boston Common, and in the presence of a hundred thousand people, men, women, and children, with whom I have no contract on the subject, take a pretended “oath” that I will enforce upon them the laws of Moses, of Lycurgus, of Solon, of Justinian, or of Alfred, that pretended “oath” is, on general principles of law and reason, of no obligation. It is of no obligation, not merely because it is intrinsically a criminal one, but also because it is given to nobody, and consequently pledges my faith to nobody. It is merely given to the winds.

XIIResponsibilities of Tax-Gatherers

For the same reasons, the pretended “oaths” of all the other pretended agents of this secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers are, on general principles of law and reason, equally destitute of obligation. They are given to nobody; but only to the winds.

The pretended “oaths” of the tax-gatherers and treasurers of the gang, are, on general principles of law and reason, of no validity. If any tax-gatherer, for example, should put the money he receives into his own pocket, and refuse to part with it, the members of this gang could not say to him: “You collected that money as our agent, and for our uses; and you swore to pay it over to us, or to those we should appoint to receive it. You have betrayed us, and broken faith with us.”

It would be a sufficient answer for him to say to them:
“I never knew you. You never made yourselves individually known to me. I never gave my pretended “oath” to you, as individuals. You may, or you may not, be members of that secret gang, who appoint agents to rob and murder other people; but who are cautious not to make themselves individually known, either to such agents, or to those whom their agents are commissioned to rob. If you are members of that gang, you have given me no proof that you ever commissioned me to rob others for your benefit. I never knew you, as individuals, and of course never promised you that I would pay over to you the proceeds of my robberies. I committed my robberies on my own account, and for my own profit. If you thought I was fool enough to allow you to keep yourselves concealed, and use me as your tool for robbing other persons; or that I would take all the personal risk of the robberies, and pay over the proceeds to you, you were particularly stupid. As I took all the risk of my robberies, I propose to take all the profits. Begone! You are fools, as well as villains. If I gave my pretended “oath” to anybody, I gave it to other persons than you. But I really gave it to nobody. I only gave it to the winds. It answered my purposes at the time. It enabled me to get the money I was after, and now I propose to keep it. If you expected me to pay it over to you, you relied only upon that honor that is said to prevail among thieves. You now understand that that is a very poor reliance. I trust you may become wise enough to never rely upon it again. If I have any duty in the matter, it is to give back the money to those from whom I stole it; not to pay it over to such villains as you.”

XIIIPretended “Oaths” by Foreigners, Southerners, and Soldiers

On general principles of law and reason, the pretended “oaths” which foreigners take, on coming here, and being “naturalized” (as it is called), are of no validity. They are necessarily given to nobody; because there is no open, authentic association, to which they can join themselves; or to whom, as individuals, they can pledge their faith. No such association, or organization, as “the people of the United States,” having ever been formed by any open, written, authentic, or voluntary contract, there is, on general principles of law and reason, no such association, or organization, in existence. And all pretended “oaths” that purport to be given to such an association are necessarily given only to the winds. They cannot be said to be given to any man, or body of men, as individuals, because no man, or body of men, can come forward with any proof that the pretended “oaths” were given to them, as individuals, or to any association of which they are members. To say that there is a tacit understanding among a portion of the male adults of the country, that they will call themselves “the people of the United States,” and that they will act in concert in subjecting the remainder of the people of the country to their dominion; but that they will keep themselves personally concealed by doing all their acts secretly, is wholly insufficient, on general principles of law and reason, to prove the existence of any such association, or organization, as “the people of the United States”; or consequently to prove that the pretended “oaths” of foreigners were given to any such association.

XIV

On general principles of law and reason, all the pretended “oaths” which since the civil war, have been given by southern men, that they will obey the pretended “laws of congress,” support the supposed “union,” and the like, are of no validity. Such pretended “oaths” are invalid, not only because they were extorted by military power, and threats of confiscation, and because they are in contravention of men’s natural right to do as they please (provided they do not harm others or the property of others), but also because they were given to nobody. They were nominally given to the supposed “United States.” But being nominally given to the supposed “United States,” they were necessarily given to nobody, because, on general principles of law and reason, there were no pretended “United States,” to whom the pretended “oaths” could be given. That is to say, there was no open, authentic, avowed, legitimate association, corporation, or body of men, known as the “United States,” or as “the people of the United States,” to whom the pretended “oaths” could have been given. If anybody says there was such a corporation, let him state who were the individuals that composed it, and how and when they became a corporation. Were Mr. A, Mr. B, and Mr. C members of it? If so, where are their signatures? Where is the evidence of their membership? Where is the record? Where is the open, authentic proof? There is none. Therefore, in law and reason, there was no such corporation.

On general principles of law and reason, every corporation, association, or organized body of men, having a legitimate corporate existence, and legitimate corporate rights, must consist of certain known individuals, who can prove, by legitimate and reasonable evidence, their membership. But nothing of this kind can be proved in regard to the corporation, or body of men, who call themselves “the United States.” Not a man of them, in all the pretended “northern States,” can prove by any legitimate evidence, such as is required to prove membership in other legal corporations, that he himself, or any other man whom he can name, is a member of any corporation or association called “the United States,” or “the people of the United States,” or, consequently, that there is any such corporation. And since no such corporation can be proved to exist, it cannot of course be proved that the pretended “oaths” of southern men were given to any such corporation. The most that can be claimed is that the pretended “oaths” were given to a secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who called themselves “the United States,” and extorted those pretended “oaths.” But that certainly is not enough to prove that the pretended “oaths” are of any obligation.

XV

On general principles of law and reason, the pretended “oaths” of soldiers, that they will serve a given number of years, that they will obey the orders of their superior officers, that they will bear true allegiance to the supposed “government,” and so forth, are of no obligation. Independently of the criminality of a pretended “oath,” that, for a given number of years, he will kill all whom he may be commanded to kill, without exercising his own judgment or conscience as to the justice or necessity of such killing, there is this further reason why a soldier’s pretended “oath” is of no obligation, viz., that, like all the other pretended “oaths” that have now been mentioned, it is given to nobody. There being, in no legitimate sense, any such corporation, or nation, as “the United States,” nor, consequently, in any legitimate sense, any such entity as “the government of the United States,” a soldier’s pretended “oath” given to, or contract made with, such an absent entity, is necessarily an pretended “oath” given to, or a contract made with, nobody. Consequently such pretended “oath” or “contract” can be of no obligation or authorization. Hence any killing done by such a soldier is done purely on his personal responsibility.

XVIInvalidity of Pretended “Treaties”

On general principles of law and reason, the “treaties” (pretended) which purport to be entered into with other supposed “nations,” by persons calling themselves “ambassadors,” “secretaries,” “presidents,” and “senators” of the supposed “United States,” in the name, and in behalf, of “the people of the United States,” are of no validity. These pretended “ambassadors,” “secretaries,” “presidents,” and “senators,” who claim to be the agents of “the people of the United States,” for making these purported “treaties,” can show no open, written, or other authentic evidence that either the whole “people of the United States,” or any other open avowed, responsible body of men, calling themselves by that name, ever authorized these pretended “ambassadors” and others to make treaties in the name of, or binding upon any one of, “the people of the United States,” or any other open, avowed, responsible body of men, calling themselves by that name. No one ever authorized these pretended “ambassadors,” “secretaries,” and others, in their name and behalf, to recognize certain other persons, calling themselves “emperors,” “kings,” “queens,” and the like, as the rightful rulers, sovereigns masters, or representatives of the different peoples whom they assume to “govern,” to represent, and to bind.

The “nations,” as they are called, with whom our pretended “ambassadors,” “secretaries,” “presidents,” and “senators” profess to make supposed “treaties” are as much myths as our own. On general principles of law and reason, there are no such “nations.” That is to say, neither the whole people of “England,” for example, nor any open, avowed, responsible body of men, calling themselves by that name, ever, by any open, written, or other authentic contract with each other, formed themselves into any bona fide, legitimate association or organization, or authorized any pretended “king,” “queen,” or other representative to make treaties in their name, or to bind them, either individually, or as an association, by such treaties.

Our pretended “treaties,” then, being made with no legitimate or bona fide “nations,” or representatives of “nations,” and being made, on our part, by persons who have no legitimate authority to act for us, have intrinsically no more validity than a pretended “treaty” made by the “Man in the Moon” with the “King of the Pleiades.”

XVIIFraudulent Debts

On general principles of law and reason, debts contracted in the name of “the United States,” or of “the people of the United States,” are of no validity. It is utterly absurd to pretend that debts to the amount of twenty-five hundred millions of dollars are binding upon thirty-five or forty millions of people, when there is not a particle of legitimate evidence – such as would be required to prove a private debt – that can be produced against any one of them, that either he, or his properly authorized attorney, ever contracted to pay one cent.

Certainly, neither the whole people of the country, nor any number of them, ever separately or individually contracted to pay a cent of these debts. Certainly, also, neither the whole people of the country, nor any number of them, by any open, written, or other authentic and voluntary contract, united themselves as a firm, corporation, or association, by the name of “the United States,” or “the people of the United States,” and authorized their agents to contract debts in their name. Certainly, too, there is in existence no such firm, corporation, or association as “the United States,” or “the people of the United States,” formed by any open, written, or other authentic and voluntary contract, and having corporate property with which to pay these debts.

How, then, is it possible, on any general principle of law or reason, that debts that are binding upon nobody individually, can be binding upon forty millions of people collectively, when, on general and legitimate principles of law and reason, these forty millions of people neither have, nor ever had, any corporate property?, never made any corporate or individual contract?, and neither have, nor ever had, any corporate existence?

Who, then, created these debts, in the name of “the United States”? Why, at most, only a few persons, calling themselves “members of congress,” etc., who pretended to represent “the people of the United States,” but who really represented only a secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who wanted money to carry on the robberies and murders in which they were then engaged; and who intended to extort from the future people of the country, by robbery and threats of murder (and real murder if that should prove necessary), the means to pay these debts.

This gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who were the real principals in contracting these debts, is a secret one, because its members have never entered into any open, written, avowed, or authentic contract, by which they may be individually known to the world, or even to each other. Their real or pretended representatives, who contracted these debts in their name, were selected (if selected at all) for that purpose secretly (by secret ballot), and in a way to furnish evidence against none of the principals individually; and these principals were really known individually neither to their pretended representatives who contracted these debts in their behalf nor to those who lent the money. The money, therefore, was all borrowed and lent in the dark; that is, by men who did not see each other’s faces, or know each other’s names; who could not then, and cannot now, identify each other as principals in the transactions; and who consequently can prove no contract with each other.

Furthermore, the money was all lent and borrowed for criminal purposes; that is, for purposes of robbery and murder; and for this reason the contracts were all intrinsically void, and would have been so, even though the real parties, borrowers and lenders had come face to face, and made their contracts openly, in their own proper names.

Furthermore, this secret gang of robbers and murderers, who were the real borrowers of this money, having no legitimate corporate existence, have no corporate property with which to pay these debts. They do indeed pretend to own large tracts of wild lands, lying between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and between the Gulf of Mexico and the North Pole. But, on general principles of law and reason, they might as well pretend to own the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans themselves; or the atmosphere and the sunlight; and to hold them, and dispose of them, for the payment of these debts.

Having no corporate property with which to pay what purports to be their corporate debts, this secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers are really bankrupt. They have nothing to pay with. In fact, they do not propose to pay their debts otherwise than from the proceeds of their future robberies and murders. These are confessedly their sole reliance; and were known to be such by the lenders of the money, at the time the money was lent. And it was, therefore, virtually a part of the contract, that the money should be repaid only from the proceeds of these future robberies and murders. For this reason, if for no other, the contracts were void from the beginning.

In fact, these apparently two classes, borrowers and lenders, were really one and the same class. They borrowed and lent money from and to themselves. They themselves were not only part and parcel, but the very life and soul, of this secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who borrowed and spent the money. Individually they furnished money for a common enterprise; taking, in return, what purported to be corporate promises for individual loans. The only excuse they had for taking these pretended corporate promises of, for individual loans by, the same parties, was that they might have some apparent excuse for the future robberies of the gang (that is, to pay the debts of the corporation), and that they might also know what shares they were to be respectively entitled to out of the proceeds of their future robberies.

Finally, if these debts had been created for the most innocent and honest purposes, and in the most open and honest manner, by the real parties to the contracts, these parties could thereby have bound nobody but themselves, and no property but their own. They could have bound nobody that should have come after them, and no property subsequently created by, or belonging to, other persons.

XVIIIThe Lenders of Blood-Money

The pretended “constitution” having never been signed by anybody; and there being no other open, written, or authentic contract between any parties whatever, by virtue of which the “United States government” (pretended), is maintained; and it being well known that none but male persons, of twenty-one years of age and upwards, are allowed any voice in the supposed “government”; and it being also well known that a large number of these adult persons seldom or never vote at all; and that all those who do vote, do so secretly (by secret ballot ), and in a way to prevent their individual votes being known, either to the world, or even to each other; and consequently in a way to make no one openly responsible for the acts of their pretended agents, or representatives – all these things being known – the questions arise: Who composes the real “governing power” in the country? Who are the men, the responsible men, who rob us of our property? Who restrain us of our liberty? Subject us to their arbitrary dominion? And devastate our homes, and shoot us down by the hundreds of thousands, if we resist? How shall we find these men? How shall we know them from others? How shall we defend ourselves and our property against them? Who, of our neighbors, are members of this secret gang of tyrants, robbers and murderers? How can we know which are their houses, that we may burn or demolish them? Which their property, that we may destroy it? Which their persons, that we may kill them, and rid the world and ourselves of such tyrants and monsters?

These are questions that must be answered before men can be free; before they can protect themselves against this secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who now plunder, enslave, and destroy them. The answer to these questions is, that only those who have the will and the power to shoot down their fellow men, are the real rulers in this, as in all other pretended “civilized countries,” for by no others will civilized men be robbed, or enslaved.

Among savages, mere physical strength, on the part of one man may enable him to rob, enslave, or kill another man. Among barbarians, mere physical strength, on the part of a body of men, disciplined, and acting in concert, though with very little money or other wealth, may, under some circumstances, enable them to rob enslave, or kill another body of men, as numerous, or perhaps even more numerous, than themselves. And among both savages and barbarians, mere want may sometimes compel one man to sell himself as a slave to another. But with so-called “civilized peoples,” among whom knowledge, wealth, and the means of acting in concert, have become diffused; and who have invented such weapons and other means of defense as to render mere physical strength of less importance; and by whom soldiers in any requisite number, and other instrumentalities of war in any requisite amount, can always be had for money, the question of war, and consequently the question of power, is little else than a mere question of money. As a necessary consequence, those who stand ready to furnish this money, are the real rulers. It is so in Europe, and it is so in this country.

In Europe, the nominal rulers, the pretended “emperors,” “kings,” and “parliaments,” are anything but the real rulers of their respective countries. They are little or nothing else than mere tools, employed by the wealthy to rob, enslave, and (if need be) murder those who have less wealth, or none at all. The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents – men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest – stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who call themselves “governments,” to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved.

They lend their money in this manner, knowing that it is to be expended in murdering their fellow men, for simply seeking their liberty and their rights; knowing also that neither the interest nor the principal will ever be paid, except as it will be extorted under terror of the repetition of such murders as those for which the money lent is to be expended.

These money-lenders, the Rothschilds, for example, say to themselves: If we lend a hundred millions sterling to the pretended “queen and parliament of England,” it will enable them to murder twenty, fifty, or a hundred thousand people in England, Ireland, or India; and the terror inspired by such wholesale murder, will enable them to keep the whole people of those countries in subjection for twenty, or perhaps fifty, years to come; to control all their trade and industry; and to extort from them large amounts of money, under the name of taxes; and from the wealth thus extorted from them, they (the “queen” and “parliament”) can afford to pay us a higher rate of interest for our money than we can get in any other way. Or, if we lend this sum to the pretended “emperor of Austria,” it will enable him to murder so many of his people as to strike terror into the rest and thus enable him to keep them in subjection, and extort money from them, for twenty or fifty years to come. And they say the same in regard to the pretended “czar of Russia,” the “king of Prussia,” the “emperor of France,” or any other so called “ruler,” who, in their judgment, will be able, by murdering a reasonable portion of his people, to keep the rest in subjection, and extort money from them, for a long time to come, to pay the interest and principal of the money lent to him.

And why are these men so ready to lend money for murdering their fellow men? Solely for this reason, viz., that such loans are considered better investments than loans for purposes of honest industry. They pay higher rates of interest; and it is less trouble to look after them. This is the whole matter.

The question of making these loans is, with these lenders, a mere question of pecuniary profit. They lend money to be expended in robbing, enslaving, and murdering their fellow men, solely because, on the whole, such loans pay better than any others. They are no respecters of persons, no superstitious fools, that reverence pretended “monarchs.” They care no more for a pretended “king,” or “emperor,” than they do for a beggar, except as he is a better customer, and can pay them better interest for their money. If they doubt his ability to make his murders successful for maintaining his power, and thus extorting money from his people in future, they dismiss him as unceremoniously as they would dismiss any other hopeless bankrupt, who should want to borrow money to save himself from open insolvency.

When these great lenders of blood-money, like the Rothschilds, have loaned vast sums in this way, for purposes of murder, to a pretended “emperor” or “king,” they sell out the bonds taken by them, in small amounts, to anybody, and everybody, who are disposed to buy them at satisfactory prices, to hold as investments. They (the Rothschilds and their ilk) thus soon get back their money, with great profits; and are now ready to lend money in the same way again to any other tyrant, robber, and murderer, called an “emperor” or “king,” who, they think, is likely to be successful in his robberies and murders, and able to pay a good price for the money necessary to carry on his robberies and murders.

This business of lending blood-money is one of the most thoroughly sordid, cold-blooded, and criminal that was ever carried on, to any considerable extent, amongst human beings. It is like lending money to slave traders, or to common robbers and pirates, to be repaid out of their plunder. And the men who loan money to pretended “governments” for the purpose of enabling the latter to rob, enslave, and murder their people, are among the greatest villains that the world has ever seen. And they as much deserve to be hunted and killed (if they cannot otherwise be gotten rid of) as any slave traders, robbers, or pirates that ever lived.

When these “emperors” and “kings,” pretended, have obtained their loans they proceed to hire and train immense numbers of professional murderers, called “soldiers,” and employ them in shooting down all who resist their demands for money. In fact, most of them keep large bodies of these murderers constantly in their service, as their only means of enforcing their extortions. There are now, I think, four or five millions of these professional murderers constantly employed by the pretended “sovereigns” of Europe. The enslaved people are, of course, forced to support and pay all these murderers, as well as to submit to all the other extortions which these murderers are employed to enforce.

It is only in this way that most of the pretended “governments” of Europe are maintained. These pretended “governments” are in reality only great bands of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, organized, disciplined, and constantly on the alert. And the pretended “sovereigns,” in these different supposed “governments,” are simply the heads, or chiefs, of different bands of tyrants, robbers, and murderers. And these heads or chiefs are dependent upon the lenders of blood-money for the means to carry on their robberies and murders. They could not sustain themselves a moment but for the loans made to them by these blood-money loan-mongers. And their first care is to maintain their credit with them; for they know their end is come, the instant their credit with them fails. Consequently, the first proceeds of their extortions are scrupulously applied to the payment of the interest on their loans.

In addition to paying the interest on their bonds, they perhaps grant to the holders of them great monopolies in banking, like the Banks of England, of France, and of Vienna, with the agreement that these banks shall furnish money whenever, in sudden emergencies, it may be necessary to shoot down more of their people. Perhaps also, by means of tariffs on competing imports, they give great monopolies to certain branches of industry, in which these lenders of blood-money are engaged. They also, by unequal taxation, exempt wholly or partially the property of these loan-mongers, and throw corresponding burdens upon those who are too poor and weak to resist.

Thus it is evident that all these men, who call themselves by the high-sounding names of “Emperors,” “Kings,” “Sovereigns,” “Monarchs,” “Most Christian Majesties,” “Most Catholic Majesties,” “High Mightinesses,” “Most Serene and Potent Princes,” and the like, and who claim to rule “by the grace of God,” by “Divine Right” – that is, by “special authority from Heaven” – are intrinsically not only the merest miscreants and wretches, engaged solely in plundering, enslaving, and murdering their fellow men, but that they are also the merest hangers on, the servile, obsequious, fawning dependents and tools of these blood-money loan-mongers, on whom they rely for the means to carry on their crimes. These loan-mongers, like the Rothschilds, laugh in their sleeves, and say to themselves: These despicable creatures, who call themselves “emperors,” and “kings,” and “majesties,” and “most serene and potent princes,” who profess to wear “crowns,” and sit on “thrones”; who deck themselves with ribbons, and feathers, and jewels; and surround themselves with hired flatterers and lickspittles; and whom we suffer to strut around, and palm themselves off, upon fools and slaves, as “sovereigns and lawgivers specially appointed by Almighty God”; and to hold themselves out as the sole fountains of honors, and dignities, and wealth, and power – all these miscreants and impostors know that we make them, and use them; that in us they live, move, and have their being; that we require them (as the price of their positions ) to take upon themselves all the labor, all the danger, and all the odium of all the crimes they commit for our profit; and that we will unmake them, strip them of their gewgaws, and send them out into the world as beggars, or give them over to the vengeance of the people they have enslaved, the moment they refuse to commit any crime we require of them, or to pay over to us such share of the proceeds of their robberies as we see fit to demand.

XIXThe Superstitious Belief in Pretended “Authorities”

Now, what is true in Europe, is substantially true in this country. The difference is the immaterial one, that, in this country, there is no visible, permanent head, or chief, of these tyrants, robbers, and murderers, who call themselves “the government.” That is to say, there is no one man, who calls himself “the state,” or even “emperor,” “king,” or “sovereign”; no one who claims that he and his children rule “by the Grace of God,” by “Divine Right,” or by “special appointment from Heaven.” There are only certain men, who call themselves “presidents,” “senators,” and “representatives,” and claim to be the authorized agents, for the time being, or for certain short periods, of all “the people of the United States”; but who can show no credentials, or powers of attorney, or any other open, authentic evidence that they are so, and who notoriously are not so; but are really only the agents of a secret gang of tyrants, robbers, and murderers, whom they themselves do not know, and have no means of knowing, individually; but who, they trust, will openly or secretly, when the crisis comes, sustain them in all their usurpations and crimes.

What is important to be noticed is, that these pretended “presidents,” “senators,” and “representatives,” these pretended agents of all “the people of the United States,” the moment their exactions meet with any formidable resistance from any portion of “the people” themselves, are obliged, like their co-robbers and murderers in Europe, to fly at once to the lenders of blood-money, for the means to sustain their power. And they borrow their money on the same principle, and for the same purpose, viz., to be expended in shooting down all those “people of the United States” – their own constituents and principals, as they profess to call them – who resist the robberies and enslavement which these borrowers of the money are practicing upon them. And they expect to repay the loans, if at all, only from the proceeds of the future robberies, which they anticipate it will be easy for them and their successors to perpetrate through a long series of years, upon their pretended principals, if they can but shoot down now some hundreds of thousands of them, and thus strike terror into the rest.

Perhaps the facts were never made more evident, in any country on the globe, than in our own, that these soulless blood-money loan-mongers are the real rulers; that they rule from the most sordid and mercenary motives; that the ostensible “government,” the pretended “presidents,” “senators,” and “representatives,” are merely their tools; and that no ideas of, or regard for, justice or liberty had anything to do in inducing them to lend their money for the war. In proof of all this, look at the following facts.

Nearly a hundred years ago we professed to have gotten rid of all that religious superstition, inculcated by a servile and corrupt priesthood in Europe, that supposed “rulers” derived their pretended “authority” directly from “heaven”; and that it was consequently a religious duty on the part of the people to obey them. We professed long ago to have learned that governments could rightfully occur only by the free will, and on the voluntary support, of those who might choose to sustain them. We all professed to have known long ago, that the only legitimate objects of government were the maintenance of liberty and justice equally for all. All this we had professed for nearly a hundred years. And we professed to look with pity and contempt upon those ignorant, superstitious, and enslaved peoples of Europe, who were so easily kept in subjection by the frauds and force of their terrocrats.

Notwithstanding all this, that we had learned, and known, and professed, for nearly a century, that these lenders of blood-money had, for a long series of years previous to the civil war, been the willing accomplices of the slave-holders in perverting the pretended “government” from the purposes of liberty and justice, to the greatest of crimes. They had been such accomplices for a purely pecuniary consideration, to wit, a control of the markets in the South; in other words, the privilege of holding the slave-holders themselves in industrial and commercial subjection to the manufacturers and merchants of the North (who afterwards furnished the money for the war). And these Northern merchants and manufacturers, these lenders of blood-money, were willing to continue to be the accomplices of the slave-holders in the future, for the same pecuniary consideration. But the slave-holders, either doubting the fidelity of their Northern allies, or feeling themselves strong enough to keep their slaves in subjection without Northern assistance, would no longer pay the price which these Northern men demanded. And it was to enforce this price in the future – that is, to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South – that these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the war, in order to secure to themselves the same, or greater, monopolies in the future. These – and not any love of liberty or justice – were the motives on which the money for the war was lent by the North. In short, the North said to the slave-holders: If you will not pay us our price (give us control of your markets) for our assistance against your slaves, we will secure the same price (keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for maintaining dominion over you; for the control of your markets we will have, whether the tools we use for that purpose be black or white, and be the cost, in blood and money, what it may.

On this principle, and from this motive, and not from any love of liberty, or justice, the money was lent in enormous amounts, and at enormous rates of interest. And it was only by means of these loans that the objects of the war were accomplished.

And now these lenders of blood-money demand their pay; and the “government,” pretended, becomes their tool, their servile, slavish, villainous tool, to extort it from the labor of the enslaved people both of the North and the South. It is to be extorted by every form of direct, and indirect, and unequal taxation. Not only the nominal debt and interest – enormous as the latter was – are to be paid in full, but these holders of the debt are to be paid still further – and perhaps doubly, triply, or quadruply paid – by such tariffs on imports as will enable our home manufacturers to realize enormous prices for their commodities; also by such monopolies in banking as will enable them to keep control of, and thus enslave and plunder, the industry and trade of the great body of the Northern people themselves. In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price which these lenders of blood-money demand, and insist upon, and are determined to secure, in return for the money lent for the war.

This program having been fully arranged and systematized, they put their sword into the hands of the chief murderer of the war (pretended “general” Grant), and charge him to carry their scheme into effect. And now he, speaking as their organ, says: “Let us have peace.” The meaning of this is: Submit quietly to all the robbery and slavery we have arranged for you, and you can have “peace.” But in case you resist, the same lenders of blood-money, who furnished the means to subdue the South, will furnish the means again to subdue you. These, alone, are the terms on which terrocrats ever give “peace” to “their people.”

The whole affair, on the part of those who furnished the money, has been, and now is, a deliberate scheme of robbery and murder; not merely to monopolize the markets of the South, but also to monopolize the currency, and thus control the industry and trade, and thus plunder and enslave the laborers, of both North and South. And the impostors who masquerade as “congress” and “the president” are today the merest tools for these purposes. They are obliged to be, for they know that their own power, as “rulers,” pretended, is at an end, the moment their credit with the blood-money loan-mongers fails. They are like a bankrupt in the hands of an extortioner. They dare not say nay to any demand made upon them. And to hide at once, if possible, both their servility and their crimes, they attempt to divert public attention, by crying out that they have “Abolished Slavery!” That they have “Saved the Country!” That they have “Preserved our Glorious Union!” and that, in now paying the “National Debt” as they call it (as if the people themselves, all of them who are to be taxed for its payment, had really and voluntarily joined in contracting it), they are simply “Maintaining the National Honor!”

By “maintaining the national honor,” they mean simply that they themselves, tyrants, robbers, and murderers, assume to be “the nation,” and will keep faith with those who lend them the money necessary to enable them to crush the great body of the people under their feet; and will faithfully appropriate, from the proceeds of their future robberies and murders, enough to pay all their loans, principal and interest.

The pretense that the “abolition of slavery” was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud of the same character with that of “maintaining the national honor.” Who, but such usurpers, robbers, and murderers as they, ever established slavery? And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general – not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only “as a war measure,” and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both white and black. And yet these impostors now cry out that they have abolished the chattel slavery of the black man – although that was not the motive of the war – as if they thought they could thereby conceal, atone for, or justify that other slavery which they were fighting to perpetuate, and to render more rigorous and inexorable than it ever was before. There was no difference in principle – but only one of degree – between the slavery they boast they have abolished, and the slavery they were fighting to preserve; for all restraints upon men’s natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.

If their object had really been to abolish slavery, or maintain liberty or justice generally, they had only to say: “All, whether white or black, who want the protection of this government, shall have it; and all who do not want it, will be left in peace, so long as they leave us in peace.” Had they said this, slavery would necessarily have been abolished at once; the war would have been saved; and a thousand times nobler union than we have ever had would have been the result. It would have been a voluntary union of free men; such a union as will one day occur among all men, the world over, if the several “nations,” so called, shall ever get rid of the usurpers, robbers, and murderers, masquerading as “governments,” that now plunder, enslave, and destroy them.

Still another of the frauds of these men is, that they are now establishing, and that the war was designed to establish, “a government of consent.” The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a “government of consent,” is this – that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot. This idea was the dominant one on which the war was carried on; and it is the dominant one, now that we have gotten what is called “peace.”

Their pretenses that they have “Saved the Country,” and “Preserved our Glorious Union,” are frauds like all the rest of their pretenses. By them they mean simply that they have subjugated, and maintained their power over, an unwilling people. This they call “Saving the Country”; as if an enslaved and subjugated people – or as if any people kept in subjection by the sword (as it is intended that all of us shall be hereafter) – could be said to have any “country.” This, too, they call “Preserving our Glorious Union”; as if there could be said to be any union, glorious or inglorious, that was not voluntary. Or as if there could be said to be any union between masters and slaves; between those who conquer, and those who are subjugated.

All these cries of having “abolished slavery,” of having “saved the country,” of having “preserved the union,” of establishing “a government of consent,” and of “maintaining the national honor,” are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats – so transparent that they ought to deceive no one – when uttered as justifications for the war, or for now compelling people to pay the cost of the war, or for compelling anybody to support terrocrats against their will.

The lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continues to pay “national debts,” pretended – that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered – so long there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection. But when they refuse any longer to pay for being thus cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered, they will cease to have cheats, and usurpers, and robbers, and murderers, and blood-money loan-mongers for masters.

CONCLUSION

Inasmuch as the pretended “constitution” was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such a one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the pretended “constitution” is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the gang of terrocrats has made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from the intended “government” the supposed “constitution” itself purports to “authorize.” He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the pretended “constitution” really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either “authorized” such a “government” as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

THE ANATOMY OF SLAVESPEAK

Note
The original title of this report was “Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland.” Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, was a most advanced freethinker, centuries ahead of his time. He questioned all aspects of religion and politics, particularly in his book A Tale of a Tub. Swift’s best-known classic Gulliver’s Travels is much more than a children’s book; it’s an advanced political analysis. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician and philosopher — and political analyst. The two ‘Alice-books’ can be regarded in part as political tracts disguised as children’s books. This report is an essential aid to understanding the “Spooner-insight” — see The Constitution of No Authority by Lysander Spooner.

“My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely; but she added to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be afraid of them!” [emphasis added]…The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming, “Off with her head! Off with–”

“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Introduction

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.” – Joseph Stalin”Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.” – Robert Anton Wilson, Introduction to The Tree of Lies (by Christopher S. Hyatt. Ph.D.)

The first thing I want you to realize is that the primary tool or WEAPON terrocrats use to subjugate, control, and dominate their victims is WORDS. By “terrocrat” I mean “coercive political agent” or “terrorist bureaucrat.” A terrocrat is always an individual human being.

Please think about this issue. How often has a terrocrat stuck a gun in your face and said, “Pay your taxes or else?” Compare this to the number of times terrocrats have sent you pieces of paper with words on them, telling you what to do or what not to do — and what penalties you may be subjected to, if you don’t obey?

Now, please stretch your imagination and imagine a world in which nobody takes the words of terrocrats seriously. They say, “We are the government,” and everyone laughs at them and asks, “Government? — what’s that?” And, whatever they reply, they are greeted with more laughter.

Then they say, “Our word is law; and you must obey.” Everyone just laughs at the terrocrats and asks, “Law? — what’s that?” Again, whatever they reply, they are greeted with more laughter.

How much power would terrocrats have in such a world?

I don’t care how much thought you have to put into this, but it’s absolutely vital that you understand that the primary means terrocrats use to subjugate, control, and dominate their victims is words.

Actually, there are three kinds of “things” terrocrats use to control their victims. The first is violence. The second is money. And the third is words. By violence, here, I mean actual physical violence. (Threats of violence are almost always expressed in words.)

How often has a terrocrat used actual violence to control you? Were you physically dragged into school, or were you coerced by words to go to school? Has any terrocrat ever used actual physical violence to make you pay taxes, or were you coerced by words to pay up?

Have you ever been arrested? If so, in what proportion did the cop use actual physical violence compared to words. Did he tell you to put your hands behind your back, or did he force your hands behind your back without saying anything? Notice that even during most arrests, cops use more words than actual physical violence to control their victims.

Have you ever been to court? To what proportion do the terrocrats and lawyers use words in court compared to actual physical violence?

Have you ever been to jail? To what proportion do the terrocrats use words in jail compared to actual physical violence?

How much power would terrocrats have in a world in which everyone says “NO!” to them and laughs at whatever they say? Can you begin to appreciate that the power of terrocrats depends largely on victims accepting terrocrat words and obeying them?

What about money? To what extent do terrocrats use money to subjugate, control, and dominate their victims? Well, they say their “law” (words) is that you must use their money; you’re not allowed to print your own. And doesn’t their money largely consist of pieces of paper with words (and a few pictures) on them? In the absence of words, could terrocrats use money to control people? And don’t their “legal tender laws” consist entirely of words?

In their book Powershift the Tofflers indicate how power has progressively shifted first from those who command violence to those who command money, and second to those who command information. And doesn’t information consist mostly of words?

What I want you to get, to grasp, to understand is that the power of terrocrats depends more on words than on anything else. Of course, their words have to be accepted, believed, and obeyed by the vast majority of victims. But what would happen if a critical mass of enlightened, emancipated former victims were to reject terrocrat words, were to stop believing them, were to attack and ridicule them whenever appropriate, and were to carefully and judiciously stop obeying them?

Some of the ideas in this report may be threatening to your current knowledge. In his classic book Nineteen-Eighty-Four, George Orwell coined terms like “thoughtcrime” and “crimestop.” If your current knowledge is “legal,” then some of the ideas presented here are “thoughtcrimes.” From the terrocrat perspective, attacking and ridiculing their words is no doubt a thoughtcrime.

Your mind may find it difficult to deal with some of these ideas. Orwell wrote:

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [an “authority”], and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

So, please don’t let crimestop stop you!

Benefits of Understanding Slavespeak
Once you understand political Slavespeak (the language used to establish and maintain master-slave relationships), you become very aware of how those who don’t understand Slavespeak can be dominated, subjugated, and controlled by words — essentially enslaved by words. Correspondingly, you become impervious to external control through words. In other words, you enjoy more freedom — you have more options available to you.

If you’re active in promoting freedom, you’ll see that most current freedom-promoting activities, while they may yield short-term benefits, are unlikely to bring about any significant expansion of freedom in the long term. The reason for this is that the most basic way tyrants and terrocrats wield their power is a “control-via-words” mechanism. Most current freedom-promoting activities don’t attack this basic mechanism; in fact, they tend to reinforce and perpetuate it.

Understanding Slavespeak enables you to discard activities you may otherwise waste your precious time on. It enables you to focus on activities most likely to benefit you, while at the same time having the greatest potential for reducing the power of terrocrats, at least insofar as terrocrat actions infringe on your personal life and affairs.

A further benefit of understanding Slavespeak is that you’ll become more aware of how people, generally, are manipulated through words. It will become much more difficult for others to manipulate you.

Understanding and transcending Slavespeak improves your perception of the world and enables you to act or behave more effectively in relation to it. In his article Toward Understanding E-Prime, Robert Anton Wilson wrote:

“It seems likely that the principal software used in the human brain consists of words, metaphors, disguised metaphors, and linguistic structures in general. The Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis, in anthropology, holds that a change in language can alter our perception of the cosmos. A revision of language structure, in particular, can alter the brain as dramatically as a psychedelic. In our metaphor, if we change the software, the computer operates in a new way.”

(Other quotes:)

“If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.” – Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment“The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.” – Dresden James

“Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

What Nietzsche Said

“There are still peoples and herds somewhere, but not with us, my brothers: here there are states.The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I shall speak to you of the death of peoples.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth; “I, the state, am the people.”

It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them.

Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law.

I offer you this sign: every people speaks its own language of good and evil: its neighbor does not understand this language. It invented this language for itself in custom and law.

But the state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies — and whatever it has, it has stolen.

Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth. Even its belly is false.

Confusion of the language of good and evil; I offer you this sign of the state. Truly, this sign indicates the will to death! Truly, it beckons to the preachers of death!

Many too many are born: the state was invented for the superfluous!

Just see how it lures them, the many-too-many! How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them!

…It would like to range heroes and honorable men about it, this new idol! It likes to sun itself in the sunshine of good consciences — this cold monster!

It will give you everything if you worship it, this new idol: thus it buys for itself the luster of your virtues and the glance of your proud eyes.

It wants to use you to lure the many-too-many. Yes, a cunning device of Hell has here been devised, a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honors!

Yes, a death for many has here been devised that glorifies itself as life: truly a heart-felt service to all preachers of death!

I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where universal slow suicide is called — life.”

What Hubbard Said

“ON CONTROL AND LYINGTHE ONLY WAY YOU CAN CONTROL PEOPLE IS TO LIE TO THEM. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them. When you find an individual is lying to you, you know that the individual is trying to control you. One way or another this individual is trying to control you. That is the mechanism of control. This individual is lying to you because he is trying to control you — because if they give you enough misinformation they will pull you down the tone scale so that they can control you. Conversely, if you see an impulse on the part of a human being to control you, you know very well that that human being is lying to you. Not “is going to,” but “is” lying to you.

Check these facts, you will find they are always true. That person who is trying to control you is lying to you. He must tell you lies in order to continue control, because the second you start telling anybody close to the truth, you start releasing him and he gets tougher and tougher to control. So, you can’t control somebody without telling them a bunch of lies. You will find that very often Command has this as its greatest weakness. It will try to control instead of leading. The next thing you know, it is lying to the [illegible]. Lie, lie, lie, and it gets worse and worse, and all of a sudden the thing blows up.

Well, religion has done this. Organized religion tries to control, so therefore must be lying. After a while it figures out (even itself) that it is lying, and then it starts down tone scale further and further, and all of a sudden people get down along this spring-like bottom (heresy) and say, “Are we going into apathy and die, or are we going to revolt?” And they revolt, because you can only lie to people so long.

Unfortunately there is always a new cycle of lying.”

– L. Ron Hubbard, Technique 88

What Is Slavespeak?
“It is illusions and words that have influenced the mind of the crowd, and especially words — words which are as powerful as they are chimeral, and whose astonishing sway we shall shortly demonstrate,” wrote Gustave le Bon in his classic The Crowd, a century ago.

In The Second Sin Thomas Szasz wrote, “Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control of man.” Alfred Korzybski, founder of General Semantics indicated that, “Those who control symbols control humanity.”

“Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.” – Robert Anton Wilson

The language used to subjugate, control, and dominate others I lump together as “Slavespeak.” Slavespeak is similar to the word Newspeak, invented by George Orwell and described in his book Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I use Slavespeak in essentially the same way Orwell used Newspeak, except that Slavespeak covers more words than I think Orwell would have regarded as Newspeak. Slavespeak includes words like: “state,” “government,” “law,” “king,” “constitution,” “queen,” “president,” “prime minister,” “nation,” “country,” “anthem,” etc. Slavespeak, as I use the term, has developed over many centuries. I’ve also expanded what I mean by Slavespeak beyond politics.

I specifically use political Slavespeak in the sense of Orwell’s ‘B vocabulary’:

“The ‘B vocabulary’ consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them… the ‘B’ words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables… even in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations… the intention being to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness… ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word ‘Duckspeak’ meaning ‘to quack like a duck.'” [emphasis added]

Political Slavespeak consists of terrocrat words — words that give terrocrats advantages over their victims; words that — if accepted, believed, and used — put victims at a disadvantage.

“Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.” – Robert Anton Wilson

If a terrocrat can persuade a victim to accept his Slavespeak words, he automatically subjugates his victim. If a victim accepts the Slavespeak words of a terrocrat, he automatically positions himself as a subject in relation to the terrocrat — and the terrocrat gains power over him.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.””The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Slavespeak is not limited to the political domain. It includes all language that may put an individual at a disadvantage in relation to others and to the world in general. Slavespeak probably occurs in most domains of human endeavor:

Philosophical;

Psychological/Emotional;

Economic;

Religious;

Political/Legal;

Scientific;

Health; etc.

An example of philosophical Slavespeak is the notion of “absolute truth.” Dr. Michael Hewitt-Gleeson of The School of Thought calls it the “Plato Truth Virus.” I strongly recommend that you do his “Brain Freebie” course.

Al Siebert’s book Peaking Out: How my Mind Broke Free from the Delusions of Psychiatry presents a trenchant description of how psychiatric Slavespeak operates and its consequences. Siebert was awarded a fellowship for post-doctoral psychiatric training at the Menninger Foundation. He dared to question “incontestable psychiatric dogma” and outlined some breakthrough ideas to his “psychiatrist teachers.”

They were not amused. They had him committed to a psychiatric hospital as a mental patient. The book includes a narrative of Siebert’s real-life experiences as an institutionalized mental patient. It also tells how Siebert saw through the delusional belief system which controls the minds of psychiatrists. A key quote:

“Then their white coats, the diplomas, their titles are cues that keep them in a hypnotic-like trance. Their perceptions of others, the special language they use, the labels they give to patients — all are programmed responses, just like with cult members.”

After Siebert left the psychiatric ward and the Menninger Foundation, he had a tremendous peak experience — the kind of peak experience described by psychologist Abraham Maslow. As Siebert was driving south out of Topeka, he suddenly had the feeling that for the first time in his life he was totally free.

He writes:

“It was glorious! It was a new feeling. Up until then my mind had been controlled by illusions and I hadn’t known it.I started yelling, ‘I’m free! I’m free! My mind is totally free! I can feel it!’

I shouted as loud as I could, ‘My mind is freeeeeeee!” [Siebert’s emphasis]

Freeing your mind from illusions and delusional belief systems can be one of the most liberating things you can experience. It can also be one of the most powerful things you can experience. This report can serve as a starting point for systematically ridding your mind of the major illusions which the vast majority of humans suffer from — particularly in the political domain.

A key phrase in the Siebert quote above is “up until then my mind had been controlled by illusions and I hadn’t known it.” Becoming aware that your mind is controlled by illusions is a major step in freeing yourself from Slavespeak.

Economic Slavespeak consists of language that keeps people trapped in economic failure or poverty. At age 16, I discussed my possible future career with my father. At one point I said, “Well, I could always go into business.” He replied, “You’ll never succeed in business!” — economic Slavespeak. Had I accepted his “economic curse” as valid, it would have condemned me to failure in business.

All religious language which places the individual who accepts it at a disadvantage I regard as religious Slavespeak.

The word “heat” as it was once “understood” by many scientists serves as an example of scientific Slavespeak. In Right Where You Are Sitting Now Robert Anton Wilson wrote:

“The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth.”Physicists, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, “heat”; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics before we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) — a relationship between the motions of molecules.”

So scientists wasted nearly three centuries because their thinking was essentially entrapped by the word “heat,” as they interpreted it. More on “heat” later.

An example of Slavespeak in the health domain: “Nature is perfect; you shouldn’t try to improve on nature by taking artificial supplements.”

[Note that we could expand the scope of Slavespeak to include symbols like “diplomas,” “national flags,” “uniforms,” “military ceremonies,” “saluting,” “curtsying,” “religious rites,” etc.]

This report deals mainly with political Slavespeak — which proliferates in most cultures.

Two Tribes
Consider two different isolated tribes somewhere in the jungles of South America. Call them Tribe 1 and Tribe 2. Each has its unique language with its own structure. The language of Tribe 1 (Language 1) tends to be very literal. A man who fishes, for example, is called “man-who-fishes.” The same man, while sleeping, is called “man-who-sleeps”; while talking, “man-who-talks”; while running, “man-who-runs”; while eating, “man-who-eats”; while writing, “man-who-writes”; while making a chair, “man-who-makes-chair”; while giving orders, “man-who-gives-orders”; etc. In Language 1, distinctions are made between different kinds of words: “Thing-words,” “Do-words,” “How-words,” “Story-words,” “Funny-words,” “Order-words,” “Panic-words,” “What-words,” “Who-words,” “Why-words,” “When-words,” “Where-words,” etc. High-level abstractions are rare in language 1. To the people of Tribe 1, any word that doesn’t refer to something physically perceivable, is highly suspect. Their test for reality is physical.

The language of Tribe 2 (Language 2) is very different. A man who obtains his wherewithal mostly by fishing, is called “fisherman.” (This system of nomenclature would seem absurd to the people of Tribe 1 — how can you call someone a “fisherman” when he is not fishing, but sleeping?) Language 2 contains many high-level abstractions — like “happiness.” People from Tribe 2 can talk for hours about “happiness.” (To someone from Tribe 1, this would be incomprehensible — they only talk about “woman-who-is-happy” while she is happy, and “woman-who-is-sad” while she is sad. The notion that you could separate “happiness” from a real person being happy, and talk about “happiness” as if it existed by itself, would be completely unthinkable to someone from Tribe 1.)

To the people from Tribe 2, any word being used is automatically assumed to be part of existence, otherwise people wouldn’t use it. (To someone from Tribe 1, the word “existence” would be a meaningless absurdity, because in their mentality only particular objects exist.) In Tribe 2, the test for reality is agreement. If other people agree with a word and the way it seems to be used, then that word is automatically accepted as valid and useful.

Eventually John-the-stranger gives up trying to convince the people of Tribe 1 that he has a “special status” and that his words are different from the words of anyone else — so he leaves, to search for more gullible and impressionable victims elsewhere…

For many days and nights he trudges through the jungle before discovering the people of Tribe 2. They: “Who you?” He: “I King.” They: “Your name King?” He: “No, my name John.” They: “Why call self King if name John?” He: “I special person, agent of God.” They: “You look different; what God?” He: “God creator of world.” They: “Where God?; How create world?” He “God everywhere; God all-powerful.” They: “Show special?” Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: “You King, agent of God.” He: “Yes, my word law.” They: “What law?” He: “Law special word of God through me; you must obey.” Whereupon the people of Tribe 2 bow down and kiss the feet of John — they do not habitually test abstractions against reality, so they readily accept John-the-stranger as their “King” and his word as “law.” Thereafter all he has to do to subjugate, control, and dominate them, is open his mouth…

“Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.” – Robert Anton Wilson

The people from Tribe 1 reject the Slavespeak words of John the would-be-terrocrat — making them impossible to subjugate, control, and dominate. To them the terrocrat is merely a clever liar and trickster.

The Tribe 2 people accept John’s word “King” to describe himself. They believe that “King” John has special powers because of the tricks he performs and because of his connection to “God.” By accepting John’s terrocrat words they automatically place him in a superior position and themselves in inferior positions. Just by accepting, believing, and using the terrocrat word “King,” they yield their power to the terrocrat — they subjugate themselves.

It’s worth emphasizing that just by accepting the concepts/words of the would-be tyrant, you place yourself at a huge disadvantage. By doing so, you relinquish your power, enabling the would-be tyrant to become an actual tyrant. Instead of laughing at his silly notions, you’ll probably end up begging him to “change the law” so you can be free. And guess who has the last laugh!

Neocheating and Deep-Cheating
The concept of “neocheating” comes from the subject “Neo-Tech,” developed by Dr. Frank Wallace. My understanding of the mechanisms of cheating, the extent to which most of us are being cheated, and how to deal with this pervasive cheating received a tremendous boost from studying Neo-Tech and applying its principles. This has made it much easier for me to recognize and confront Slavespeak, and to demystify my brain. This demystification involves identifying, questioning, and exposing the words “neocheaters” and “deep-cheaters” use to dupe their hapless victims.

The following extracts are from the Neo-Tech Discovery, Vol. I:

“The traditional cheater is, for example, the crude sneak thief. He is also the small-time bureaucrat or politician on the take. He needs little skill and much gall to extract his living. But he lives in constant danger of being caught in the act and subjected to the consequences.The classical cheater is, for example, the elegant con-artist thief. He is also the respected technocrat who, for example, helps develop weapons for a repressive government. Application of his skills (that took years to polish or develop) lets him exact a “good” living. His dishonesty usually remains unseen and uncalled by those who surround him as he cheats countless people out of their assets and lives.

The neocheater is, for example, the subtle executive thief who climbs to a high-paid corporate position by deceptive machinations rather than by productive efforts. He is also the religious leader who gleans a glorious living by promoting self-sacrifice among the multitudes. And the ultimate neocheater is the politician gracing the highest office. He usurps a sumptuous living, enormous power, and a huge ego trip by converting productive assets of the earners into nonproductive waste for the “public good” through the invisible manipulations of government force (e.g., taxes and regulations). His techniques require neither skill nor effort: he is simply shrewd and subtle enough to keep most people from realizing that he is constantly neocheating them — constantly draining their lives and assets. And most dangerously, he considers his neocheating as necessary for the “good of all.”

Neocheaters are by far the deadliest menace to honest and productive people, everywhere…

The careful observer will recognize that by far the highest percentage of people involved in building false self-esteems to justify their existences are those pursuing careers in politics and religion. Such careers are by nature anti-productive and depend on neocheating the public to extract money, respect and power…

But the supreme value of the neocheating concepts is that those new thinking tools will be the cutting edge for rejecting and eventually eliminating the power of government bureaucrats, political leaders, dishonest businessmen, external authorities, and all other neocheaters.

The concepts of neocheating as revealed by the Neo-Tech Discovery are among the most powerful thinking tools for future prosperity.”

However, there is a level of cheating that is deeper than those identified by Neo-Tech. I call it “deep-cheating.” Deep-cheating has two basic elements:

Inducing people to accept certain concepts or words — like “king,” “law,” “government,” “state,” “nation,” “society,” “country,” etc. (all Slavespeak words) — as valid. This is what John the clever trickster tried to do to the two tribes above in respect of “king” and “law.”

Inducing people to accept certain persons as “special” or having “special powers.” John the clever trickster tried to do this by claiming that he was an “agent of God,” and by performing tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. Terrocrats are “special” because they are “the government” and only they have “special powers” to do certain things like “make laws.”

As we shall see later, the most effective deep-cheaters are lawyers and their ilk in the “legal” profession.

“He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do if you yourself did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? …[F]rom all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.” [emphasis added]

There are three basic ways victims provide support to terrocrat-tyrants:

By voting in political elections;

By paying “taxes” to terrocrat-tyrants;

By using the Slavespeak words of terrocrat-tyrants.

The One-Word Lie
In order to grasp the devastating power of Slavespeak words, it’s absolutely vital that you understand that a word in itself can constitute a lie. You don’t need a phrase or sentence to express a lie. One word by itself is enough.

Some one-word lies, like “sunrise” and “sunset” are innocuous. They are lies because the sun doesn’t really “rise” or “set.” Because the earth spins and we spin with it on its surface, it appears as if the sun “rises” and “sets” — if we think of ourselves as stable with the sun moving in relation to us. So the words “sunrise” and “sunset” probably go back to before people realized that the earth revolved. Nevertheless, using the words “sunrise” and “sunset” — even if we realize they’re not strictly correct — doesn’t cause any problems. They are innocuous.

The words “King” and “Queen” — and “Emperor” and “President” (in the political sense as “President” of a “country”) — are likewise lies — one-word lies. Just by accepting the word “Emperor” and thinking and/or talking about someone else as “Emperor,” you automatically put yourself in an inferior position in relation to him — unless, of course, you call yourself “Emperor of Emperors” and others take you seriously!

“My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely; but she added to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be afraid of them!” [emphasis added]…The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming, “Off with her head! Off with–”

“Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

By accepting and using the term “Emperor,” you tend to relinquish some of your power to the clever trickster who masquerades as “Emperor.” You position the huckster as your superior; and you position yourself as the huckster’s inferior.

The word “Emperor” is a lie. Because, as De la Boétie said, “He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man…” There’s nothing “special about him that warrants calling him “Emperor.” Calling him “Emperor” is a form of idolatry.

Some people go part of the way in exposing the lie by proclaiming, “The Emperor has no clothes!” But to go all the way, you have to ask, “Why do you hallucinate an ordinary naked man as “Emperor” (so-called)?” By “hallucinate” I basically mean “seeing what’s not there.” Where there is an ordinary man, the idolater “sees” something extra or “special” that makes the ordinary man an “Emperor.”

Simply by using the word “Emperor” as if valid, you reinforce, spread, and perpetuate the lie — and you support the tyrant. You relinquish some of your power to him; you subjugate yourself. To withdraw support you have to stop hallucinating him as an “Emperor” and see the physical reality of an ordinary naked man. You have to stop calling him “Emperor”; stop thinking of him as “Emperor.”

“She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn’t make out what had happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really — was it really a sheep that was sitting on the other side of the counter?” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

(In other words, the person you’ve been hallucinating as a “Queen” is really a sheep! — a major theme of the ‘Alice Books.’)

Robert Anton Wilson wrote as follows in his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now:

“On a night in September 1927 when he contemplated suicide at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller decided to live the rest of his life as an experiment. He wouldn’t believe anything anybody told him — “golden rule,” “dog-eat-dog,” or any of it — and would try to find out by experience only, what could be physically demonstrated to work.In the year following that decision, Bucky stopped talking entirely, like many mystics in the east. He insists that he had nothing “mystical” in mind. “I was simply trying to free myself of conditioned reflexes,” he said. He had met pioneer semanticist Alfred Korzybski shortly before and was convinced that Korzybski was correct in his claim that language structures caused conditioned associations — mechanical reactions that keep us locked into certain perceptual grids. Fuller tried to break these grids, to find out what a person “of average intelligence” could accomplish if guided only by personal observation and experiment…

The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth.

Physicists, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, “heat”; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics before we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) — a relationship between the motions of molecules.

Around the turn of this century — this is all old news, even though most literary “intellectuals” still haven’t heard about it — several mathematicians and philosophers who were well versed in the physical sciences began to realize consciously that there is not necessarily a “thing” (a static and block-like entity) corresponding to every noun in our vocabulary.” [emphasis added]

The word “heat” — in the sense of a substance — is a one-word lie. In reality there is no substance or thing that corresponds to the word “heat.” When we say that something is “hot,” we describe a condition or state. To then assume that there is a thing called “heat,” that exists independently of the hot object, is silly.

Similarly, as we saw earlier in the case of Tribe 1, the idea that there is a thing or substance called “happiness,” that exists independently of a person being happy, is absurd.

“”What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they won’t answer to them?””No use to them,” said Alice; “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?””

– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Addition and Hallucination
Now let’s examine the phenomenon of “addition” as described by William James in his lecture “Pragmatism and Humanism”:

“In many familiar objects every one will recognize the human element. We conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to our conception…We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so, — though if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them. We name the same constellations diversely, as Charles’s Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper…

In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition.”

The above comes from the book Pragmatism and four essays from The Meaning of Truth. The entry in the index is worded, “Additions, human, to the given.”

OK. So there are stars out there. They are the given. Looking at them from earth, some of them seem to constitute “groups” and we call such a “group” a “constellation.” However, some of the stars in a supposed “constellation” are much further from earth than others. There’s no basis in reality to regard them as a “group” or “constellation” — as opposed to a flock of birds that actually fly together, or a galaxy of stars that actually move together.

Hallucination essentially means allegedly “seeing” something that isn’t there. In reality there are a number of stars. We “see” a supposed “constellation,” where in reality there’s no “constellation” — only individual stars. We add or hallucinate the falsely-called “constellation.”

This phenomenon of adding to reality — hallucinating what isn’t really there — is an essential aspect of Slavespeak. Thus an ordinary man is hallucinated as an “Emperor” or a “King.” In our mind we add something “special” to an ordinary man, and we “see” him as an “Emperor” or a “King.”

Similarly we add “something” to ordinary words, and as if by magic they become “the law.”

Likewise, ancient scientists perceived hot objects and assumed (“saw” that) there must be a substance called “heat.” This notion of “heat” as a substance is an unwarranted addition to the given (hot object). It’s a kind of hallucination — trying to “see” what isn’t there.

What Robert Anton Wilson Said
In his Introduction to the book The Tree of Lies (by Christopher S. Hyatt. Ph.D.), Robert Anton Wilson wrote:

I remember the first time I entered Alternate Reality and accepted a lie as fact. I was five or six years old at the time and my parents had taken me to see a wonderful movie called The Wizard of Oz. Toward the end of the film there was a scene in which the Wicked Witch of the West, riding her broom, wrote in the sky like one of the mysterious skywriting airplanes that I was accustomed to seeing. The airplanes always wrote the same strange message — I.J. FOXFINE FURS — but the Wicked Witch wrote something far different and absolutely terrifying. She wrote:

SURRENDER DOROTHY

I was so frightened that I burst into tears. My parents had a hell of a job quieting me down, and I must have annoyed all the adults in the theater. Today, over 50 years later, I understand better what had happened. Sitting in the dark, staring at the movie screen, I had crossed the line between “reality” and “fantasy” — a line that is not nearly as firm for a child as it is (or seems to be) for an adult. Dorothy’s danger, up there on the screen, was more “real” than my safety, down in the dark audience. This may or may not qualify as an imprinting experience in the Lorenzian sense, but it was traumatic in the Freudian sense. Even today, as I typed the terrible words “Surrender Dorothy,” I felt a reflex shudder pass through me.

Well, a few years later I was able to distinguish movies from “real” reality. I watched the Frankenstein monster wreak havoc on the villagers, King Kong run amok in New York, Lon Chaney Jr. turn into a werewolf, and none of it fooled me. I was amused at the younger kids who screamed during these films, or closed their eyes “in the scary parts.” Still — only my conscious ego, or forebrain, was immune to the hypnosis. I still jumped when the director pulled his shock scene.

Watching adult audiences these days, none of whom believe literally in Indiana Jones or the Temple of Doom, or even in Batman and Joker, I see that, whatever they think they know, parts of their old brain, and of their bodies, still enter hypnosis easily. That’s why they gasp, and cringe, and breathe hard, and have similar physical reactions, when things get rough up there on the silver screen. I can still see these reactions in myself, too, of course.

Only a small part of our brains, or our “selves,” is able to resist the lies of a good artist. Nobody can sit through “Alien,” I would wager, without at least one sound of fear or distress escaping their lips during that “ordeal” …which consists only of looking at pictures projected on a screen…

A movie theater is the best place to learn the true meaning of Plato’s parable of the prisoners in the cave, who accept shadows as reality. Every artist who moves us, from a movie maker to Beethoven or Shakespeare, is a bit of a hypnotist.

In this sense that seemingly stupid and mechanical contraption we call “society” must rank as the greatest artist on the planet. For instance, when I was seven or eight, and feeling superior to the kids who closed their eyes “during the scary parts,” I was entering a deep hypnosis created by another Virtual Reality called language. This hypnosis was a worse nightmare than the Wicked Witch of the West or King Kong or the Wolf-Man or any of their kith and kin, but it made me a “member of society” — and “a member of the Body of Christ” as well.

The hypnosis was performed by the good and pious nuns at the school to which my parents sent me. Every day, school began with a prayer. After lunch, there was another prayer. When lessons were finished for the day, before they let us go, there was another prayer. Five days a week, September to June every year, for eight years, these prayers formed my consciousness into a Catholic mold. They were reinforced by Religious Knowledge class, in which we memorized the catechism, containing all the dogmas of the church. We had to pass examinations on that, just like we did in arithmetic, as if the two subjects were equally valid.

The result of all these prayers and all that memorization was that I came to do well in a Virtual Reality in which a nasty old man living on a cloud a few miles above Earth was watching me all the time and would probably charbroil me or roast me or toast me if he ever caught me doing anything he didn’t like. He was called God. He had a partner, even nastier, called Satan, who presided over the charbroiling and roasting and toasting, in caverns that honeycomb the hollow Earth. Between the two of them, God and Satan, life was far more terrifying than any “horror movie.”

As a result of all the lies the nuns told me, I became a pretty good liar myself. When it came time for high school, I convinced my parents I wanted to be an engineer. That persuaded them to send me to Brooklyn Technical High School, and I didn’t have to listen to the nuns drone on about God and Satan and Hell and all that horror movie stuff anymore. That was my real goal — getting out of the Catholic nexus. I didn’t want to become an engineer at all.

At seventeen I became a Trotskyist. That was hot stuff in New York in the late 1940s. We Trots were more radical than anybody, or we thought we were. Of course, I was lying to myself again. Who the hell knows enough, at seventeen, to make an intelligent or informed choice among competing political ideologies? I had picked Trotskyism because one part of my mind was still Catholic and needed a hierarchy; the Central Committee made a good substitute for the Vatican. It allowed me to feel modern, scientific, “altruistic,” brave, rebellious etc. and it did all my thinking for me.

At eighteen I quit The Party just before they could expel me. I pledged allegiance to the principles of individualism, free thought and agnosticism. From now on, I said, I will not be hypnotized by groups: I will think for myself. Naturally, I then spent over 20 years following various intellectual and political fads, always convinced I had at last escaped group conditioning and finally started “really” thinking for myself. I went from Agnosticism back to dogmatic atheism, and then to Buddhism; I bounced from Existentialism to New Left Activism to New Age Mysticism and back to Agnosticism. The carousel turned around and around but I never found a way to stop it and get off.

All this, mind you, occurred within the network of language — the Virtual Reality created by the strange symbol-making capacity of the upper quarter inch of our front brain. Language created God and Satan and Hell, in my childhood, and it created Liberty and Equality and Justice and Natural Law and other fictions that obsessed me at other stages of my “development.” Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us…. [emphasis added]

(See my Quantum Psychology, New Falcon Publications, 1990, for further examples of how language creates a Virtual Reality experienced as just as real as a bottle of beer and a ham sandwich.)

Is it is possible to use language to undo the hallucinations [emphasis added] created by language? The task seems impossible, but Zen riddles, Sufi jokes, the works of Aleister Crowley, and a few heroic efforts by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein seem able to jolt readers awake — shake them out of the hypnosis of words…”

“Constitution” as a One-Word Lie
To fully understand the nature and extent of this lie, you need to read all of Lysander Spooner’s The Constitution of No Authority. The terrocrats who masquerade as “government” apply their so-called “Constitutions” to everyone as if they are valid contracts entered into by everyone and binding upon everyone. Yet Spooner demonstrated from many different angles why this is not and could not be so. The whole thing is in fact completely absurd.

When I first read Spooner’s pamphlet it was an assault on my whole knowledge structure. It triggered a process of questioning many concepts: “Constitution” (so-called) — what does this word represent in reality? Clearly it represented but an empty fraud. It also meant that words did not necessarily correspond with reality. Similar questions followed about “government,” “state,” “king,” “law,” “country,” etc. These are all fraud-words which serve only to mislead and dupe the gullible. In the Introduction by James J. Martin to Spooner’s No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, I read:

“Since late Neolithic times, men in their political capacity, have lived almost exclusively by myths [more appropriate: “fraudulent fabrications” or “murderous misrepresentations!”] And these political myths have continued to evolve, proliferate, and grow more complex and intricate, even though there has been a steady replacement of one by another over the centuries. A series of entirely theoretical constructs, sometimes mystical, usually deductive and speculative, they seek to explain the status and relationships in the community…It is the assault upon the abstract and verbal underpinnings of this institution which draws blood, so to speak… those who attack the rationale of the game… are its most formidable adversaries.”

“On March 10, 1783, at the town of Newburgh, New York, a group of generals met to plan a military coup. The generals offered the leadership to an officer the troops had respected and admired for many years… [F]or several days the officer pondered whether or not he would accept the offer to become military dictator of America… [F]inally, on March 15, 1783, he announced his decision to decline. His name was George Washington……[T]he First Constitutional Convention which commenced on May 14, 1787 had George Washington presiding. This is the convention that created our current constitution. The procedures and results of this convention have long been held to be legal, ethical, constitutional, patriotic and in every other way proper… [I]t was held in secret. It had a hidden agenda. It was surrounded by clandestine meetings in which numerous deals were struck. The delegates intended to draw vast amounts of new power into the hands of the federal government and they violated every restriction their legislatures tried to impose on them. The First Constitutional Convention was actually a military coup. The history books do not describe it this way, but that is what it was…

It may have been the slickest, smoothest, most well-lubricated coup any nation has ever experienced. To this day, most Americans do not understand what was really done to them. They look back on it all and smile wistfully.”

The implications of the falsely-called “US Constitution” being a fraud and a hoax are far-reaching and very difficult to confront by most:

1. In reality there never has been and there isn’t now a “country” or “nation” called the “United States of America.” (The fact that several hundred million people think of themselves as “Americans” constituting “the American nation” is at best a convenient, shared fiction, but doesn’t constitute reality.)

2. There never has been and there isn’t now a “government” of the “USA” — there have only been hucksters who masqueraded as “government” and suckers who believed them.

3. All the falsely-called “Presidents,” “Secretaries,” “Congressmen,” “Judges,” “Ambassadors,” etc. have been liars and impostors. (All these people have been — and are now — “ordinary naked humans” hallucinated by most as being exalted, when in reality they are mere liars and impostors.)

4. Spooner’s reasoning also applies to all the “American States” as well as all other pretended “countries” — all the “political systems” in the world are fraudulent hoaxes, all the “government officials” are liars and impostors — albeit unwitting.

5. In reality there never have been and there aren’t now any so-called “laws” in any of these pretended “countries.” (To regard some of the noises and scribbles that emanate from the mouths and pens of political impostors as “the law” is a stupefying and debilitating hallucination.)

6. In addition to what is now being done to expand freedom in the world, some radically different strategies need to be developed and implemented.

The Ability of Reframing
In Open to Change, Vincent Nolan wrote:

“Reframing means looking at a familiar phenomenon from a new angle. Any situation can be looked at in a wide variety of different frameworks, and each one is capable of throwing a new light on the subject… [T]he ability and willingness to set aside the conventional framework (temporarily) is one of the key skills of invention and discovery… [T]hese pigeon holes into which we classify things and situations, events and people, are themselves arbitrary and artificial: convenient and useful for some purposes — but one, not the only way to view the world. The pigeon holes can be suspended (temporarily) and new ones brought to bear, without cost and with profit.There is another important dimension to reframing. Once we accept that the same thing can be viewed in many different ways, all of them potentially useful, it is no longer necessary to impose our view of things on other people, we can accept theirs as alternative viewpoints, valid for themselves, and potentially enriching our understanding of the situation.”

In A Tale of A Tub Jonathan Swift wrote:

“…[A]t a Grand Committee, some Days ago, this important Discovery was made by a certain curious and refined Observer; That Sea-men have a Custom when they meet a Whale, to fling him out an empty Tub, by way of Amusement, to divert him from laying violent Hands upon the Ship. This Parable was immediately mythologiz’d: The Whale was interpreted to be “Hobbes’s Leviathan,” which tosses and plays with all other Schemes of Religion and Government, whereof a great many are hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to Rotation.”

The Man Who Helped Open My Eyes

“”The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn…” – Merlyn, The Once and Future King

Some years ago I visited a Luxembourg bank to deposit some paper money and buy gold coins. I had to wait in line. I started talking to the man behind me. After a while he told me he was a libertarian. After we’d concluded our business we met in a nearby café for coffee. I told him that I was also a libertarian.

“Libertarian!” he snorted, “practically all so-called libertarians are still so conditioned and so far from the truth, they don’t know the first thing about liberty.”

I looked at him in surprise. I considered libertarians to be the leading edge of human evolution. There followed a sometimes heated discussion about many aspects and principles of libertarianism. Time and time again this most extreme radical questioned even the words I used, for example: When I asked, “What about the laws of a country?” my new friend responded:

“Haw, haw, haw,” laughing almost hysterically. I thought he would fall off his chair. Several people in the café looked at him in bemusement. “What about the barking of copulating baboons in the zoo?” he said.

I was bewildered: “What’s so funny?”

“My friend,” he said, “like most so-called libertarians, you don’t have the foggiest notion of what exists and what doesn’t. You believe in magical “law” like a spiritualist believes in supernatural “ghosts”… except… except that your belief is possibly even more absurd than that of the spiritualist. You see, I’ve heard of people who claim that they have seen “ghosts”; there are even purported photographs of “ghosts.” But I’ve never heard of anyone who claims that he has seen a so-called “law,” never mind photographed it.”

“Anyway,” I said, “what does all this have to do with liberty?”

“My aspirant-libertarian friend,” he replied, “When you free your mind from the false concepts and misconceptions that fixate your thinking within the mental grooves fashioned by those who seek to enslave you, then you will discover what liberty really is, then you will be able to live free. Most so-called libertarians are like pigs hopelessly floundering in a cesspool of statist concepts. Just as it is almost impossible for a fish to imagine life on land, so it is very difficult, if at all possible, for an aspirant-libertarian locked into statist concepts, to conceive of life outside his self-created cesspool…”

[I apologize for my friend’s outspoken, even insulting, turn of phrase. I believe he simply used such strong words to get his point across to me, which he certainly did. If you’re a libertarian, please don’t be offended, rather look for what you can learn from my friend.]

For a while we were both silent. Then he continued, “In actuality, the whole world is an Anarchy. Individuals are supreme, whether they know it or not. We all have virtually unlimited choice all the time — we may assume notions and beliefs that limit our choice, we may also get ourselves into situations where choice is limited… but those are also choices… objectively, there are no so-called “states,” “governments,” “kings,” “queens,” etc.; there never have been and there never will be — I have asked many people to show me a “government” and to tell me what it looks like. Nobody has been able to do that. Of course, there are hucksters who call themselves “government,” “king,” or “president”… just as there are suckers who believe them — who blindly obey them — or who blindly oppose them.”

“You need to live your life in accordance with actuality: what is, what exists, what occurs. So I live my life out of a context of liberty, a libertarian enclave, an anarcho-libertarian enclave. I carry it with me like an aura. I have abilities: the ability called life, the ability to own property, the ability to produce, the ability to exchange, the ability to communicate. And my abilities do not depend on the agreement of others. I am supreme. I rule no one and no one rules me. I am responsible for every aspect of my life. My self-esteem, my power and my liberty can only be curbed by my own limitations. There are of course those who think otherwise, who would seek to violate my abilities — what you might call “rights.” When making choices, I take that into consideration.”

The Deadly Word “Law”
(This report deals with “law” in the sense of “human law,” not “scientific law.”)

For some reason, it seems that most people find it difficult to question the validity of the concept or word “law.” So we find that Robert Ringer, in his book Restoring the American Dream, in Chapter 8: “Keeping It All in Place,” indicates that the political system is kept in place by the terrocrat (statist) words I include under Slavespeak. Ringer specifically tackles words like “country” and “government,” but never questions or challenges the word “law.”

And in Million Dollar Habits Ringer writes “Man-made laws are a reality…” The reality is that almost everyone hallucinates some terrocrat noises and scribbles as “law” or “man-made law.” Nevertheless, there are many occasions during which we should at least pretend obedience, because there are terrocrats with guns who hallucinate likewise and who behave as if “man-made laws are a reality.”

Maybe there’s a psychological reason for idolizing the concept of “law.” First of all, historically and traditionally it’s been very dangerous to challenge any specific so-called “law.” The impostor masquerading as “King” said, “My word is law.” Anyone who disobeyed the supposed “law” took the risk of having his head chopped off.

To now go even further — and deeper — and challenge the very notion of “law” must be virtually unthinkable to most. Let me repeat what George Orwell wrote:

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought… Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

From the terrocrat’s point of view, the ultimate crime must be to challenge the very notion of “law.” The word “law” might be the most hypnotic word in the English language.

“Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.” – Robert Anton Wilson

I speculate that in a sense human consciousness rests on a fundamental set of concepts. If you challenge any of these concepts, it seems as if a person’s entire consciousness is being challenged or threatened; “cognitive dissonance” occurs; and the mind seems to shut off — crimestop sets in.

Some time ago I did an experiment with a French-speaking girlfriend who has studied so-called “law.” I asked her to repeat this sentence, “La notion de la “loi” (soi-disant) est une hal-loi-cination” — “The notion of the “law” (so-called) is an hal-law-cination.” She had great difficulty in just saying the words… I’ve repeated this experiment several times with similar results.

Interestingly, Jonathan Swift had no problem with questioning the “law” concept. He wrote in Gulliver’s Travels:

“There was another point which a little perplexed him… I had said, that some of our crew left their country on account of being ruined by ‘law’… but he was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the ‘law’ which was intended for ‘every’ man’s preservation, should be any man’s ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by ‘law,’ and the dispensers thereof… because he thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid… I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, accordingly as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves.” [emphasis added]

Other possible reasons why many people may find it difficult to question their concepts or words might be:

1. Most people have never questioned even one of the words they use habitually.

2. According to the principle of inertia, it’s easier to continue to think the way you’ve always thought. Questioning some of your basic concepts involves a dramatic change of direction — and some vigorous, energetic thought!

3. Questioning something about physical reality is relatively easy, e.g., I claim that the table has four legs. Simple observation settles the issue. No complex thought processes are involved. However, in questioning the validity of a concept or word, we have to use the word, while at the same time invalidating the word. So we use syntax like “the “law” (so-called)” — self-referencing syntax — involving a complex thought process many may find difficult. Furthermore, the word “law” is a high-level abstraction. In the case of “the table” there is a simple one-to-one relationship between the symbol (word) and the object it represents — the referent. Because “law” is in the domain of verbal reality, the issue of the word’s validity cannot be settled by simple observation. While you can see the ink in a so-called “lawbook,” you cannot find a simple relationship between the symbol “law” and its referent(s).

4. If you talk to your peers in the manner I do to challenge the basic political Slavespeak words, they’ll mostly think you’re crazy. What you say will make little or no sense to them — like the previous paragraph! Thus peer pressure tends to act as a powerful crimestop to prevent you from expressing dangerous thoughts like “the falsely-called “law”.”

5. We don’t have a convenient, easy-to-use syntax for questioning words or concepts. I suspect that many people find it difficult to process statements about verbal reality. So much so, that when I make a statement like, “The notion that someone is a “King” is a form of idolatry or hallucination” (a statement about verbal reality), they will compulsively “translate” (distort) it into, “He’s saying that Kings don’t exist” (a statement about physical reality).

6. Maybe certain words — like “law,” “state,” and “government” — have such powerful hypnotic effects on people, that if they try to question and challenge them, their consciousness “turns down a few notches” and they can’t think properly.

OK, so let’s imagine a world in which the concept “law” (in the sense of man-made “law”) is completely absent. Suppose that from an early age children in such a world are taught principles like:

Actions have consequences.

Humans have minds they can use to calculate and predict — at least to some extent — the consequences of actions.

Obedience can be dangerous because it tends to become a substitute for thought (calculation and prediction).

The more you think for yourself, rather than obey others, the more you learn and the more effective you become.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” said Aleister Crowley. To me this means that people will do whatever they will do, irrespective of what any supposed “law” might dictate. The idea that if terrocrats were to “make a law,” it would solve a problem, is quite silly. People will still do what they will. They may change their behavior because of the supposed “law,” but often they will tend to do so in ways different from terrocrat expectations.

The notion that humans can be “controlled” by “laws” is fundamentally flawed. This is so because humans are volitional entities with minds to think, decide, and initiate independent action.

Of course, humans may relinquish their ability to think, decide, and act volitionally — if they accept terrocrat noises and scribbles as “laws” they must obey, defy — or repeal.

If you regard another’s noises and scribbles as “the law,” then you position that person as your superior master, and you position yourself as his inferior slave. You subjugate yourself. In effect, you commit a form of intellectual and psychological suicide. That’s why the idea or concept of “law” is so deadly.

As Voltaire said, “People who believe absurdities, will commit atrocities.” And Jeremy Bentham wrote, “Out of one foolish word may start a thousand daggers.” (Bentham’s Theory of Fictions by C.K. Ogden.) So, how many crimes are committed and how many people are killed as a result of the general acceptance of the “law” concept? (By “crime” I mean “a willful act that harms another or his property.”)

Above, I claimed that the notion of “law” was a stupefying and debilitating hallucination. It’s stupefying because its form is: “Don’t think; just do it because it’s the law!” For many, “law” is a substitute for thought. “I don’t have to think what to do because the law tells me what to do!”

The notion of “law” is debilitating because of its form: “You can’t do it because it’s against the law!” “You must do it because it’s the law!” Many freedom-lovers believe that they can’t be free because of “all the laws that curtail their freedom.” Many expend a great deal of time and effort “fighting to change the law,” when their efforts could perhaps be better utilized by following other strategies.

Antony Solomon wrote the following poem:

THE ENEMY WITHINWhy do you fear his “parliament,”
This all oppressive “government,”
When darker things lurk deep inside
Your mind; crawling, scuttling, they hide.

Out, out damn spook, begone I say!
For I have resolved, myself, this day,
That I stand free in body and soul,
Not hindered by chains nor ghoul.

In The Crowd, Gustave le Bon wrote:

“Civilization is impossible without traditions, and progress impossible without destroying those traditions… no example could better display the power of tradition on the mind of crowds. The most redoubtable idols do not dwell in temples, nor the most despotic tyrants in palaces; both the one and the other could be broken in an instant. But the invisible masters that reign in our innermost selves are safe from every effort at revolt, and only yield to the slow wearing away of centuries…The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognizable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called into question. Every general belief being little else than fiction, it can only survive on the condition that it be not subjected to examination…

The only real tyrants that humanity has known have always been the memories of its dead or the illusions it has forged itself.” [emphasis added]

The debilitating “law” concept is an invisible master in the innermost self, a tyrant in the form of a self-forged illusion or hallucination.

“Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.” – Robert Anton Wilson

Lawyers: The Dispensers of “Law”

“The lawyer has learned how to flatter his master in word and indulge him in deed; but his soul is small and unrighteous… From the first he has practiced deception and retaliation, and has become stunted and warped. And so he has passed out of youth into manhood, having no soundness in him…” – Plato, 321 BC!

John Bunyan wrote in The Pilgrim’s Progress, more than three centuries ago:

“Worldly wiseman: why in yonder village (the village is named morality) there dwells a gentleman, whose name is legality, a very judicious man, and a man of a very good name, that has skill to help men off with such burdens as thine is, from their shoulders; yea, to my knowledge, he hath done a great deal of good this way; ay, and besides, he hath skill to cure those that are somewhat crazed in their wits with their burdens. To him, as I said, thou mayest go, and be helped presently…Evangelist… thou must hate his setting of thy feet in the way that leadeth to the ministration of death… he to whom thou wast sent for ease, being by name legality, is the son of that bondwoman… which thou hast feared will fall on thy head… how canst thou expect by them to be made free? This legality, therefore, is not able to set thee free from thy burden. No man was as yet ever rid of his burden by him; no, nor is ever like to be. Ye cannot be justified by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no man living can be rid of his burden; therefore, Mr. Worldly Wiseman is an alien, and Mr. Legality is a cheat; and for his son Civility, notwithstanding his simpering looks, he is but a hypocrite, and cannot help thee. Believe me, there is nothing in all this noise that thou hast heard of these sottish men, but a design to beguile thee of thy salvation, by turning thee from the way in which I had set thee.” [emphasis added]

It’s interesting that John Bunyan already recognized so long ago that lawyers essentially make noises. About a century after Bunyan, Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels about lawyers:

“It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their “laws” are written, which they take special care to multiply; whereby they have wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong…Here my master, interposing, said it was a pity, that creatures endowed with such prodigious abilities of mind as these lawyers, by the description I gave of them, must certainly be, were not rather encouraged to be instructors of others in wisdom and knowledge. In answer to which, I assured his honor, that in all points out of their own trade they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning, and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind in every other subject of discourse, as in that of their own profession.”

Question: Who are the most effective practitioners of Slavespeak? The terrocrats or the lawyers? What percentage of top terrocrats are also lawyers? Who then are the biggest enemies of freedom?

In Bentham’s Theory of Fictions Jeremy Bentham wrote:

“Behold here one of the artifices of lawyers. They refuse to administer justice to you unless you join with them in their fictions; and then their cry is, see how necessary fiction is to justice! Necessary indeed; but too necessary; but how came it so, and who made it so?As well might the father of a family make it a rule never to let his children have their breakfast till they had uttered, each of them, a certain number of lies, curses, and profane oaths; and then exclaim, “You see, my dear children, how necessary, lying, cursing, and swearing are to human sustenance!”

Many of us regard lawyers as “special” people, with something “extra” — knowledge of “the law” — masters of the terrocrat words of what must be done and what may not be done. (Fortunately, many people also have a poor opinion of lawyers, in fact, lawyers are widely in disrepute!)

Lewis Carroll wrote in The Hunting of the Snark:

“He dreamed that he stood in a shadowy Court,
Where the Snark, with a glass in its eye,
Dressed in gown, bands, and wig, was defending a pig
On the charge of deserting its sty.The Witnesses proved, without error or flaw.
That the sty was deserted when found:
And the Judge kept explaining the state of the law
In a soft under-current of sound.
The indictment had never been clearly expressed,
And it seemed that the Snark had begun,
And had spoken three hours, before anyone guessed
What the pig was supposed to have done.

The Jury had each formed a different view
(Long before the indictment was read),
And they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew
One word that the others had said.

‘You must know–‘ said the Judge:
but the Snark exclaimed, ‘Fudge!…”

Consider the entire “legal system” — the “lawmakers,” the lobbyists, the lawyers, the police, the inspectors and investigators, the prosecutors, the judges, the prisons, the prison guards, the parole officers, etc., etc. It’s a huge “legal” industry. And who benefits most? The lawyers. Who benefits most from the growth of the “legal” industry? The lawyers. Who are the best-paid people in this “legal” industry? The lawyers. Who are the biggest enemies of freedom?

What is the one concept/word that essentially forms the foundation of this entire “legal” industry”? “Law!” — Fudge!

Words as Enemy Weapons
In “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” C.S. Lewis describes how a very prestigious “Devil” lectures newly graduated “Tempters” on how to collect souls:

“Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them…You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power…

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic…

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?…

For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or simper at the first hint of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.” [emphasis added]

Notice that in a sense it’s the word “democracy” that does the work, so to speak. The terrocrat just has to utter the word, and all the rest follows. It’s as if the word has a kind of magical power in that the desired consequences result from the terrocrat just uttering the word.

The use of a word can have automatic consequences. Repeat: THE USE OF A WORD CAN HAVE AUTOMATIC CONSEQUENCES. Terrocrat words are weapons.

Furthermore, in general, terrocrats can use their words against you, but you can’t use their words against them. “We are the government; we represent the will of the people; we have a mandate from the people — you’re a radical extremist; you’re a selfish, uncaring libertarian dreamer; you’re a threat to American values.”

He who gives the names has the power. Repeat: HE WHO GIVES THE NAMES HAS THE POWER. “Don’t listen to the terrocrats; they just want to dupe you with their mindless slogans, take away your freedom by violating your rights at every turn, and empty your pocket with their exorbitant, confiscatory taxes.”

“They are not the so-called “government”; they are terrocrat crime-syndicate lawyers who violate your rights, thieves who steal your property with their forfeiture scams, murderers who gas and burn innocent women and children in Waco — and they want to take away all private guns like Hitler did, so they can gas and shoot anyone with impunity!”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

“It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal” [of contradictory elements and emotional associations], which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.”

The use of one word can have vast and far-reaching consequences. Suppose I brand you as “selfish” in front of a typical audience. This probably triggers emotions in the audience, such as disgust and hatred. It probably also triggers associations, such as: “He only cares about himself”; “He’s greedy”; “He takes unfair advantage of others”; etc. The word “selfishness” constitutes a devastating package-deal.

In None of the Above Sy Leon wrote: “Politics is an intellectual anesthetic. It can dull the mind, put it to sleep, or even kill it permanently. This is not an incidental side effect; it is a calculated result that keeps the politician in business…” The effect is created through the deliberate and careful use of certain words.

“Keeping It All in Place” is Robert Ringer’s title for Chapter 8 of his Restoring The American Dream. Most of the chapter is devoted to the ARSENAL (collection of weapons) — what I call political Slavespeak — of words terrocrats use to maintain their power and keep their victims in subjugation.

Robert Ringer analyses terms such as: “government,” “society,” “country,” “taxation,” “conscription,” “loophole,” “windfall,” “inflation,” “patriotic,” “obligation,” “justice,” “fair,” “decent,” “duty,” “public morals,” “public property,” “public good,” “public interest,” “good of society,” “duty to society,” etc. Each of these terms, to the degree that it’s accepted as valid, adds to the power of terrocrats and reduces the power and freedom of their victims.

Now let’s focus our attention on one word: “government.” In None of the Above Sy Leon also wrote:

“…[I]ntellectually active people do not think in a rut; they consider new ways, new alternatives; many of which may never have been attempted before. But this kind of questioning spells death for politics …[C]onsidering alternatives; the willingness to challenge and explore — this is what freedom and independence are all about.”

Author Kurt Vonnegut coined the word “granfalloon” to describe abstract concepts like “nation,” “state,” “country,” “government,” “society,” “IBM,” etc. He wrote, “To discover the substance of a granfalloon, just prick a hole in a toy balloon.” In his book The Incredible Secret Money Machine, Don Lancaster explains:

“A granfalloon is any large bureaucratic figment of people’s imagination. For instance, there’s really no such thing as the Feds or the General Veeblefeltzer Corporation. There are a bunch of people out there that relate to each other, and there’s some structures, and some paper. In fact, there’s lots and lots of paper. The people sit in the structures and pass paper back and forth to each other and charge you to do so.All these people, structures, and paper are real. But nowhere can you point to the larger concept of “government” or “corporation” and say, “There it is, kiddies!” The monolithic, big “they” is all in your mind.” [emphasis added]

A granfalloon is the lumping together of many diverse elements into an abstract collection, and to then think and speak as if the abstract collection is one single entity capable of performing actions. This phenomenon leads people to say things like “the government runs the country.” I hope you realize by now just how absurd the previous Slavespeak sentence is!

Consider the possibility that because people generally consider this word/concept as valid and a given, they think, communicate, and behave in ways that have resulted in over a hundred million people slaughtered during this, the Twentieth Century. Because of political brainwashing the “citizens” believe they must “fight for their country.” When the terrocrats say, “Go kill the evil enemy,” the “loyal citizens” take up arms and proceed to slaughter each other. Would this happen on such a massive scale in the absence of Slavespeak?

Consider the possibility that in the same way that the entire “legal” industry basically rests on the concept/word “law,” the entire coercive political system basically rests on the concept/word “government.”

To begin to see why this might be so, imagine a world in which there are some would-be-terrocrats and a population of enlightened individuals who either don’t understand the word “government” or they think it’s a silly joke. (For the purpose of this thought-experiment, assume that there’s no equivalent word available to would-be-terrocrats.)

So a would-be-terrocrat says, I represent “your government” and I want you to pay me “your taxes” so I can defend your property and safety. I also want you to join “our army,” so we can go and shoot “your enemies” in the “country” next door. What success would the would-be-terrocrat have?

Realize that once the basic concept/word “government” is accepted, a whole constellation of Slavespeak concepts/words soon follow in its trail. If you accept the “government” concept, you also accept that the terrocrats who call themselves “government” have the power to “make laws,” force children into “schools” for political brainwashing, force people to pay “taxes,” force people into “armies” to kill each other, etc., etc. — what Ayn Rand calls a devastating package deal.

By accepting the basic concept/word “government,” you position the terrocrats who call themselves “government” as superior (more powerful) and you position yourself as inferior (less powerful). If you operate from this perspective, the kind of thing you tend to do to promote liberty is to beg the terrocrats to “change the law” so you can enjoy a little more freedom. You position them in power and you position yourself in weakness. You also operate in a way that, in the long run, reinforces and perpetuates the master-slave relationship between terrocrats and heir victims.

(Note: As a stopgap or makeshift measure, situations do occur where it’s not only appropriate but also vital that freedom-activists stop the terrocrats from “passing a new law,” or force them via public opinion or outcry to “amend or repeal a law.” Though such tactics tend to reinforce the underlying “government makes laws” illusion, their short-term benefits may exceed their long-term liabilities.)

Now consider the possibility that George Orwell’s term “Big Brother” is a synonym for “government.” In Nineteen-Eighty-Four Orwell wrote:

“What most afflicted him with a sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken… he… looked at the portrait of ‘Big Brother’ …the hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as if some huge force were pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses… not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense… the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command… the obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended… stones are hard, water is wet…” [emphasis added]”O’Brien left this unanswered. ‘Next question,’ he said.

‘Does Big Brother exist?’

‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment
of the Party.’

‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?’

‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien… [emphasis added]

‘Will Big Brother ever die?’

‘Of course not. How could he die? Next question.'”

[“Big Brother” is an Immortal Everything and you’re an Insignificant Nothing!]

In reality there are individual human beings, some with guns, generally considered (by both the brainwashed master-terrocrats and the brainwashed subject-victims?) to constitute “government”/”Big Brother.” In reality there are also buildings, lots of pieces of paper, computers, other equipment, vehicles, etc.

Can you make a distinction between what you can actually see, and what is assumption, addition (as described by William James), projection, or hallucination (“seeing” what isn’t really there)?

In Ayn Rand’s Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology she wrote:

“Learning consists of grasping meanings, i.e., of grasping the referents of words, the kinds of existents that words denote in reality.” [emphasis added]

Slavespeak is Kept in Place by Idolatry
George Bernard Shaw wrote that “He who worships a King and he who slays a King are idolaters alike.” Shaw was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, who wrote a book called The Twilight of the Idols. My Webster’s definition of idol includes the following:

A representation or symbol of an object of worship;

A false god;

A pretender or impostor;

A form of appearance visible but without substance;

An object of passionate devotion;

A false conception or fallacy.

In my opinion, both worshipping and hating “government” can be forms of idolatry. In the latter case, it depends on exactly what it is you hate, when you say, “I hate government.” Could it be that the libertarian or patriot who says vaguely, “I hate government,” is as much an idolater as the democrat or republican who says “I love my government,” or “I love my country.”

The Idols of Human Understanding
by Francis Bacon (condensed and edited):

“The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset men’s minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger, fortify themselves as far as may be possible against their assaults.There are four classes of idols which beset men’s minds. To these, for distinction’s sake, I have assigned names:

Idols of the tribe;

Idols of the cave;

Idols of the marketplace;

Idols of the theater.

The idols of the tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe, race, and culture of men. It is a false assertion that the measure of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well as the sense of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

The idols of the cave are the idols of the individual man. Everyone has a cave or a den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing to his personal and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed, or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.

There are also idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call idols of the marketplace, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.

Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call idols of the theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.”

Max Stirner: the Greatest Idol Smasher of All Time
Here is a brief “taste” of Stirner (edited from The Ego and Its Own):

“I no longer humble myself before any supposed “power,” and I recognize that all powers are only my power, which I have to subject at once if they threaten to become a power against or above me; each of them must be only one of my means to carry my point, as a hound is my power against game, but is killed by me if it should attack me personally. All “powers” that attempt to dominate me I then reduce to serving me. The idols exist through me; I need only refrain from creating them anew, then they exist no longer; so-called “higher powers” exist only through my exalting them and abasing myself.Man, your head is haunted; you have idols in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of “gods” that has an existence for you, a “spirit-realm” to which you suppose yourself to be called, an “ideal” that beckons to you. You have fixed ideas!

Do not think that I jest or speak figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the “higher” as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. The vast majority belongs to this category. What is it, then, that is called a “fixed idea”? An idea to which a man has subjected himself. When you recognize such a fixed idea as folly, you lock its slave up in an asylum. And is the “truth of the faith,” say, which we are not to doubt; the “majesty of the people,” which we are not to strike at; “virtue,” against which the censor is not to let a word pass, so that “morality” may be kept pure – are these not fixed ideas? Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed ideas of “morality,” “legality,” and so forth? Fools who only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?

Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the lunatic’s stealthy malice. These lunatics assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his weapon — free speech — and then they fall upon him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures. One only has to read today’s journals to get the horrible conviction that one is shut up in a house with fools. But I do not fear their curses, and I say, my brothers are arch-fools.

Whether a poor (or rich) fool of this insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is “god the father,” the “emperor of japan,” the “holy spirit,” the “president of the USA,” or whatnot — or whether a poor fool in comfortable circumstances conceives his mission as being a “good christian,” a “faithful protestant,” a “loyal citizen,” or a “virtuous man” — these are all fixed ideas.

Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church; as “pope” (so-called) Benedict XIV wrote fat books inside the papist superstition, without throwing a single doubt upon these beliefs; as authors fill whole folios on the supposed “state” without calling into question the fixed idea of “the state” itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are manacled to the fancy that man was created a political zombie – so also “subjects” wallow in “subjection,” “virtuous” people in “virtue,” and “liberals” in “humanity”; without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman’s delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them — lays hands on the “sacred”! Yes, the fixed idea, that is the truly “sacred”!”

The phenomenon of self-abasement warrants further discussion. When you call someone “King” or “President,” and yourself “their subject,” you exalt him and debase yourself. To think of Bill Clinton as “President of the U.S.A.,” is a result of gullibility, hallucination, and idolatry. The same applies to Washington, Jefferson, and all the others. They were all liars and impostors — idols. Similarly, when you regard someone’s words as “the law.” And what about the falsely-called “constitution” — the paper-idol! (Idolators hallucinate a “constitution” where there’s really nothing more than a piece of paper with ink on it.) When you surrender your power to another — for example, by political voting or paying taxes — you exalt another and debase yourself. Similarly, when you subject yourself to an idol such as “government.” These are all vile acts of self-abasement.

Slavespeak: The Most Fundamental Political Problem
Consider three levels:

Concepts/words (including Slavespeak words);

Beliefs (strings of concepts/words);

Behavior.

In order to expand liberty, I think most readers will agree, we need to somehow induce people engaged in anti-liberty behavior to change their behavior.

People tend to behave in accordance with their beliefs. If this is so, then in order to persuade people to change their behavior, we have to somehow induce them to change their beliefs.

But what if their beliefs consist of strings of concepts/words? What if certain beliefs can’t change, unless the words/concepts they consist of are changed?

According to Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repairs of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself. And if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government…” [emphasis added]

What if the basic “construction of systematic thought,” the basic “rationality,” consists of concepts/words? If so, then in order to induce people to change the most fundamental beliefs that really count, might it not be necessary that we persuade them to change some of their concepts/words?

I’m suggesting that the roots of political problems lie at the level of concepts/words — particularly political Slavespeak.

“Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.” – Robert Anton Wilson

If you accept the concept/word “selfishness” (as held by most people), you also accept the devastating package-deal (including beliefs) that goes with it. You cannot change certain beliefs about “selfishness,” without changing your very concept of “selfishness.” The same applies to the concepts/words “law” and “government.”

Slave-Mentality
See Report #04: How to Find Out Who You Are for an extensive description, examples, and potential cure of what I call Slave-Mentality; contrasted with its opposite — that of the Free Sovereign Individual.

Slave-mentality is at least partially a consequence of Slavespeak.

The Solution to the Slavespeak Problem
For some, before they’re ready to tackle political Slavespeak, they need to overcome their psychological (or other) Slavespeak. A good starting point might be Dr. Michael Hewitt-Gleeson’s “Brain Freebie” course. The section below on General Semantics may be a good starting point for others. Several other reports address various aspects of self-improvement. The Millionaire Reports may also be useful. But the emphasis of this report is on political Slavespeak.

The central insight of this report is that the roots of statism reside within individual human brains. Any lasting solution to the problem of statism needs to include individuals clearing out the roots of statism from their own brains. I contend that political Slavespeak constitutes these roots.

In The Virtue of Selfishness Ayn Rand wrote:

“If some men do not choose to think, but survive by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine sounds and motions they learned from others, never making an effort to understand… they are the men who march into the abyss, trailing after any destroyer who promises them to assume the responsibility they evade: the responsibility of being conscious.”

So, are you going to “not choose to think, but survive by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine sounds — Slavespeak words “government,” “law,” etc. — you learned from terrocrats?

In The Ego & Its Own Max Stirner wrote:

“The decision having once been made not to let oneself be imposed on any longer by the extant and palpable, little scruple was felt about revolting against the existing State or overturning the existing laws; but to sin against the idea of the State, not to submit to the idea of law, who would have dared that?”

Stirner identifies the need to challenge and attack the “idea of the State” and the “idea of law.” As Robert Pirsig essentially indicates, if you destroy “the government” and “the law,” in the long run you achieve nothing, because the more basic idea of “government” and idea of “law” remain intact, and in time will result in new “government” and new “law.”

So what you have to do, is to “unlearn” the basic political Slavespeak concepts/words/ideas that were shoved down your throat by terrocrats and their helpers, witting and unwitting. You need to destroy in your mind the validity of Slavespeak words/concepts — reduce their validity to zero — to the point that you agree with the way Jeremy Bentham described political rhetoric (what I call political Slavespeak) in Bentham’s Theory of Fictions:

“Look to the letter, you find nonsense — look beyond the letter, you find nothing.”

And assist others to do the same.

Consider the possibility that inducing people to accept and use Slavespeak words is the most destructive form of deep-cheating — that has resulted in over a hundred million people being slaughtered during the Twentieth Century. And that by your continued unconsidered use of Slavespeak words, you participate in, reinforce, and perpetuate this most destructive deep-cheating and the resulting slaughter.

[I realize that in order to communicate to people at all, you often have to use Slavespeak words as if valid, otherwise you’ll quickly lose your audience and they’ll just think you’re crazy. You can develop the ability to subtly, strongly, or viciously challenge terrocrat concepts/words, depending on the appropriateness indicated by the level of freedom knowledge and sophistication your audience.]

Once you realize the extent to which, at bottom, the entire political/legal system is a word-game; a relatively fixed word-game; in the words of Jonathan Swift, a word-game, “hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to Rotation”; a word-game in the words of Jeremy Bentham such that: “Look to the letter, you find nonsense — look beyond the letter, you find nothing” — once you realize the nature of the word-game designed to enslave you, then you can create your own superior word-game to beat the system and, in the words of the libertarian friend I met in Luxembourg, “I live my life out of a context of liberty, a libertarian enclave, an anarcho-libertarian enclave. I carry it with me like an aura.”

To ultimately remove the terrocrats’ power, a critical mass of individuals would have to reclassify as invalid in their brains the statist Slavespeak concepts/words, and stop providing intellectual/conceptual support to the terrocrats “by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine sounds and motions they learned from others” — in the words of Ayn Rand.

Repeat after me (!): They are not a huge omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent “government” (so-called) — they are individual terrocrats, often not the brightest, not the most competent, not the most hard-working. As Harry Browne said in How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, it’s a myth to believe that they can prevent you from being free.

“From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourself if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place your hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but merely that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.” – Etienne de la Boetie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

General Semantics
To understand the importance of Slavespeak, we need to operate at the level of observing, analyzing, and evaluating the implications, effects, and consequences of language. How do words influence the perception of reality? How might people unjustifiably constrain their behavior because of the language they use? How might people take incorrect or destructive actions because of the words they take for granted? Like “going to war for God and Country!”

General Semantics (GS), a discipline founded by engineer, mathematician, student of mental illness, and scholar Alfred Korzybski, addresses the same level Slavespeak does: How do our words influence the way we think, communicate, and behave? A basic understanding of GS cannot but help anyone to understand and transcend Slavespeak. The following excerpt from an article by the late George Doris, first published in 1983 in Self and Society: European Journal of Humanistic Psychology, gives an idea of where GS fits into “the scheme of things” [edited into E-Prime]:

“GRAMMAR deals with word-to-word relations. It embodies rules about how to put words together into sentences, and does not concern itself with how sentences relate to each other or how sentences relate to facts.

LOGIC goes further. To a logician, sentences serve as assertions and he concerns himself with relations between assertions (“if ‘A’, then ‘B'”). But for the logician, words need not have any meaning except as defined by other words, and the assertion need not have any relations to the world of fact.

SEMANTICS goes further than logic — to the semanticist, words and assertions have meaning only if they are related operationally to referents in the world of nature. The semanticist defines not only validity (as the logician does) but also ‘truth.’

GENERAL SEMANTICS goes furthest — it deals not only with words, assertions and their referents in nature but also with effects on human behavior. For a ‘general semanticist,’ communication consists not merely of words in proper order, properly inflected (as for the grammarian), or assertions in proper relation to each other (as for the logician), or assertions in proper relation to referents (as for the semanticist), but all these, together with the reactions of the nervous systems of the human beings involved in the communication.”

The following GS principles (with my personal interpretations and extensions) I regard as most germane to the subject of Slavespeak.

Words Don’t Have Meanings; People Have Meanings
Many people suffer from the basic linguistic illusion that “words have meanings.” If a word has a meaning, where do you find it? Can it be found in the sound when you say it? Can you find it in the ink when you write it? Can you find it in the dictionary, or does the dictionary contain only words? What characterizes or distinguishes a meaning and how can you recognize it?

Consider the possibility that:

Meanings reside in the individual brain;

Individuals create, maintain and update their meanings;

Meanings consist of a “neural-patterns-of-instructions-and-associations”;

A “neural-pattern-of-instructions-and-associations” can be compared to a computer program that essentially tells the user how to use a particular word;

In order for an individual to use a word in a manner such that he or she can think and communicate effectively, using that word, requires a brain program vastly more complex, than the “brief-user-instructions” in the dictionary;

Even if you claim that the “brief-user-instructions” constitute the meaning of a word, an individual couldn’t use that word effectively without integrating at least the meanings of all the words used in the “brief-user-instructions”;

In order to use a word effectively, the “brief-user-instructions” have to be “enriched” a thousand-fold, maybe a million-fold;

Operating on the basis that you personally create all the meaning in “your universe” greatly increases your control over your mental processes, enabling you to think, communicate, and act much more effectively.

Corresponding to the word “chair” I have in my brain a generalized picture or template of a range of kinds of objects that qualify as chairs. This forms part of my meaning for the word “chair.” I also have links to other patterns and memories I relate to “chair.” All of this complexity constitutes my meaning for the word “chair” — a meaning unique to me and vastly greater and more complex than any “meaning” to be found in a dictionary — yet similar to the meanings others have for the word “chair.” My meaning (brain-program) for using the word “chair” includes a module enabling me to determine, when others use the word “chair,” whether they use it more or less the same way I do. (No such “meaning” can be found in the dictionary.)

We can communicate because (we have to assume that) when I say “chair,” you trigger, engage, or “boot up” in your brain a meaning similar to mine. Through observing responses to communication we discern whether or not we refer the same object when we say “chair.”

Most importantly, we individually create, maintain, and update our personal meanings. Over time, we can improve our ability to use any particular word more effectively. We can learn vastly more about any given word than can be found in the dictionary. For example, I utilized a variant of English called E-Prime to write the portion of this report dealing with GS. E-Prime does not contain the verb “to be” or any of its variants; otherwise E-Prime mirrors standard English. (You’ll find the reasons for writing this way, below.) You’ll also find below, that my meaning for “to be” and its forms varies dramatically from any “meaning” you can find in a regular dictionary.

Now, what if our meanings constitute our most important creations by a long shot? If so, to what extent do we render ourselves oblivious of our most important creations? Can we create anything physical, without first creating it internally in a form that includes meaning?

If we render ourselves relatively oblivious of creating our meanings, how do we affect our awareness of our physical creations and how much control do we have? How much responsibility can we demonstrate?

If we ascribe the creation of our meanings to agencies outside ourselves (“words have meanings”), do we perhaps disown a most important part of ourselves? Do we perform most of our “meaning-processing” more or less unconsciously?

The Map Differs from the Territory
The word differs from the thing. In our minds we make all kinds of maps and models of how we think the world works. Our concepts (basic ideas) and words constitute maps or models which represent or reflect (we hope) aspects of the world. Our models and maps can be more or less useful, measured by the results we produce using them.

Our models and maps — including our words — can never do more than approximate the actual world or the actual phenomena they seek to represent. Our maps, models, and words (symbols) constitute incomplete abstractions — condensed, simplified, and approximated. Ultimately, the actual territory defies verbal description. Ultimately, the word cannot describe the thing. The world (territory) has its form or nature. Our description of it (map) includes at best incomplete details. Hense the GS aphorism (converted into E-Prime): “Whatever description you give something differs from the thing itself!” The word differs from the thing it tries to describe, reflect, or represent.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), describes three basic ways in which our models or maps differ from the territory:

Deletion — at best we use partial maps; they can seldom (if ever) include all the details of the territory.

Distortion — our maps often include minor or even major inaccuracies; one person “sees” a red car with two people, another “sees” a brown car with three people; one tennis player “sees” the ball as “in,” the opponent “sees” it as “out.”

Generalization — we often have one generalized map that represents many different parts of the territory. For example, my generalized “cow” map might represent cows in general. If someone asks me what breed of cow I saw, a Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, etc.?, I reply, “What do I care! All cows look the same to me!”

A fourth way in which our maps may differ from the territory, we’ve already covered briefly: addition or hallucination. We “see” and put into our map what does not exist in the territory. We “see” a “constellation” where only individual stars exist. Our map contains more than what can be found in the territory — addition or hallucination.

When scientists tried to find a substance corresponding to the way they “understood” the word “heat,” they attempted to add to the territory an expected “substance” they could never find. Of course, scientists eventually discovered their error because they require physical evidence which they could never find.

Preponderance of Means over Ends
As far as I know (a GS qualification), Hans Vaihinger first enunciated this principle in his book The Philosophy of As If. He said that our means tend to become more important than our ends. For example, we want to become happy. We figure if we make lots of money we’ll be happy. Money becomes the means to achieve the end of happiness. Many of us then focus on making money (means), to the extent that we lose sight of becoming happy (end). The money becomes more important than the happiness; means preponderate over ends.

In GS a specific aspect of the more general principle above, can be formulated as: The preponderance of the map over the territory; or, regarding the map as more important than the territory. Making the word more important than the thing. Korzybski called this “Intensional Evaluation — “Facts” Last.” If we elevate our words in importance above our experience of the world, we evaluate intensionally. He called this orientation “un-sane” because its linguistic delusions can endanger our success or survival. For example, if we believe that we can achieve good health by saying, “I create that whatever I eat is good for me,” and continue with unhealthy habits, we behave intensionally or in an un-sane manner.

Korzybski claimed that elevating words over facts causes much human misery, because it leads to dysfunctional, un-sane, evaluating and behavior. To achieve more sane behaviors, we must look first to experience. Korzybski called this “Extensional Evaluation — “Facts” First.” The term extensional refers to elevating experience above language. When we observe, sense, and then describe, we evaluate extensionally. Korzybski considered this a sane way to make our evaluations of the world. To look, observe, touch, feel, test, sample, etc.; and then to describe.

Now, if you look back at our two tribes, you’ll find that tribe 1 (the sane ones) practice extensional evaluation, while tribe 2 (the un-sane ones) practice intensional evaluation. It may be worthwhile to reread the two-tribes story to better grasp the extensional/intensional distinction.

The scientists looking for a substance corresponding to the word “heat,” evaluated intensionally. They started with the description “heat,” then looked and searched the territory in vain for the “fact” of “heat.”

We experience the world in at least two basic ways:

Through our senses;

Through language.

We experience the world through our senses as directly as we can. We could call it extensional experience — tends toward greater sanity.

When we experience the world through the intermediary of language indirectly, we could call it intensional experience — tends toward less sanity.

Hypostatization

“Mankind in all ages have had a strong propensity to conclude that for every name, a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the name must exist; and every complex idea which the mind has formed for itself by operating upon its conceptions of individual things, had to have an outward objective reality answering to it.” [converted into E-Prime] – J.S. Mill, A System of Logic“The Fascist State has a consciousness of its own, and a will of its own, on this account constitutes an “ethical” state.” [converted into E-Prime] – Mussolini on the Doctrine of Fascism

Hypostatization basically refers to construing a word as a thing, or regarding a purely conceptual idea as a real existent or concrete thing. Hypostatization closely resembles reification — regarding something abstract as a material thing.

In his book The Comforts of Unreason: A Study of the Motives behind Irrational Thought, Rupert Crayshaw-Williams has a chapter on hypostatization, where he analyses hypostatized abstractions like “England,” “Germany,” “country,” and “nation.” He uses the phrases “collective abstraction” and “empty linguistic convenience.”

Mill above describes hypostatization or reification. Mussolini combines reification with personification by treating his hypostatized “fascist state” (empty linguistic convenience) as a person with a conscience and a will. Mussolini’s map contains more than can be found in the reality or territory it seeks to represent — addition, in Mussolini’s case, extreme hallucination — “seeing” what can’t be found.

Hypostatization represents the extreme case of glorifying a map without a territory — a word without a thing or discernible referent — such as the word “government.” To then go further and ascribe to this supposed “government” volition and magical powers (“The purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves.” — Abraham Lincoln), reflects personification — even deification.

“Heat” again, represents a classic example of hypostatization. Because scientists had the abstract idea of “heat,” they assumed that if they searched long enough, they would eventually find a substance corresponding to their map.

Hypostatization, reification, personification, deification, and intensional evaluation may all have their roots in the more primitive forms of a phenomenon called “participation mystique” by anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl in his book How Natives Think. Participation mystique can have various elements:

The belief that objects or animals have magical powers.

The belief that an object (sometimes considered sacred) contains part of oneself, and has magical powers. (Some Australian aborigines had “churingas” (a piece of wood or stone) they rubbed when ill in order to try to heal themselves.)

The belief that the individual didn’t create the meaning; disowning the meaning and projecting it into something external.

The unconscious projection of all kinds of powers into the environment.

The loss of personal identity and rationality when in a crowd (as described by Gustav le Bon in The Crowd).

The sports fanatic who talks of the team he supports as “we.”

The “patriot” who refers to his supposed “nation” as “we.”

The “citizen” who refers to the “army” of his supposed “country” as “we.”

A lack of psychological, emotional, and intellectual independence.

Feeling lost without the approval of others.

Identification of self with objects like cars and houses.

Identification of self with a career or company.

The willingness to kill or be killed for unobservable or unprovable “causes” and “reasons.”

The demand that “society” must provide us with whatever we need.

The belief that certain words have magical powers.

Accusing others of causing your emotions.

Patriotism, “pledges of allegiance,” “anthems,” “national flags,” and the like.

Religious beliefs, rites, and practices.

Idolatry of all kinds.

Etc.

Note the correspondence and overlap between the above elements and the slave-mentality described in Report #04: How to Find Out Who You Are. Note also where (1) deletion; (2) distortion; (3) generalization; and (4) addition and hallucination occur in the above. [M. Esther Harding’s book The ‘I’ and the ‘Not-I’ includes a chapter on participation mystique.]

Semantic Reaction
Korzybsky talks about “semantic reactions” (also “neuro-semantic” or “neuro-linguistic”), where one reacts more or less automatically and unconsciously to one’s “interpretation” of an event or situation, rather than responding in a deliberate, calculated, and rational way to the event or situation itself.

Semantic reaction refers to the whole reaction of an organism: a biological-verbal-emotional reaction which could include changes in adrenaline levels, muscle tension, digestive fluids, thoughts, feelings, as well as verbal utterances.

Semantic reaction could be called “intensional reaction” (reacting to words — or possibly, pre-verbal “interpretation”), as opposed to “extensional response” (responding to the event or situation itself). Semantic reaction tends to follow experiencing the world through the automatic intermediary of language — intensional experience.

Cognitive therapist Aaron T. Beck writes in his book Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders about “automatic thoughts” that usually precede one’s automatic negative responses to events or situations. Unless we deliberately train ourselves to consciously respond to the event or situation itself (extensional response) we may be prone to react at times like puppets to “automatic thoughts” about (“interpretation” of) the event or situation (intensional reaction). For details on how to train yourself to recognize and overcome semantic response, see Report #12: How to Achieve Emotional Control.

In his book The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz makes a distinction between the “reactive-responsive orientation” (closely related to Korzybski’s semantic response) and the “creative orientation” (loosely related to what I’ve called the extensional response) — see Report #10: How To Achieve and Increase Personal Power.

Dr. Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Therapy uses the term “self-suggested nonsense,” to describe Aaron Beck’s undesirable “automatic thoughts” — what we tell ourselves, vocally and sub-vocally, as a reaction to an event or situation. Often, the “self-suggested nonsense” contains a form of the verb “to be” — “I am helpless, therefore…”; “She is about to dump me…”; “He is a Jew, so what can you expect…”; “I am a teacher, so what I am doing must be teaching…”; “He is a stupid black…”; “He is a mean white…”; “All men are the same…” or “All women are the same…”; etc.

Becoming aware of the linguistic pitfalls caused by the use of “to be” can assist us to clear the “self-suggested nonsense” from our minds. Robert Anton Wilson calls it the “is-ness illness”.

The “Is-ness Illness”
According to David Bourland:

“Everything in the “real world” changes: sometimes so rapidly that we may not notice the changes directly (as in the case of a table which appears solid), sometimes so slowly that we can (as in the case of a river).

Every person, as well as every “thing,” undergoes such changes.

One particular verb in English — “to be” — carries with it archaic associations and implications of permanence and static existence that we do not find in the “real world”.”

Is-of-Identity. When I say a terrocrat “is” a terrorist bureaucrat or coercive political agent, I’m using a limiting label. I’m implying that all politicians and political bureaucrats “are” terrocrats. This constitutes the “is-of-identity” — a confusion of levels of abstracting. To simplify, consider the statement, “The man is a terrocrat.” “Man” here represents a second-level abstraction — a verbal map of a pre-verbal map. But “terrocrat” represents a higher-level abstraction, two levels higher. On successive levels we have “man,” then “men in coercive politics,” and then “terrocrat.”

The label limits in that it may result in all “men in coercive politics” receiving paint from the same brush and receiving disapproval accordingly, while wide differences between individuals in coercive politics do occur, and some may even behave like good people, from time to time!

So, should I stop calling the bastards “terrocrats?” I don’t think so! I invoke Nietzsche’s principle of the “useful error” and Humpty Dumpty’s, “The only question: Who achieves mastery — nothing else.” [converted into E-Prime]

Most importantly, notice and alert yourself to what you do and the potential linguistic pitfalls involved. The terrocrats’ have a favorite tactics to smear someone they don’t like as, “Joe Blow is an extremist.” They wield a powerful weapon. Mostly, it works very well for them.

The same technique can also work for us. A key question: Does it produce the desired results?

Is-of-Predication. If you say, “Joe Blow is evil,” you imply that a quality or characteristic called “evil” exists in Joe. Probably, Joe did something you consider “evil.” The “evil” arose in you as an impression you experienced as a result of whatever Joe did. The “is” covers up the fact that the impression arose in you. It would be more accurate to say, “Joe did so-and-so, which I regard as an evil act because…”

The “is-of-predication” tends to encourage us to project our own impressions and evaluations onto others and the world “out there.” Whenever we use a form of the verb “to be” to connect a noun and an adjective, we frequently express a “false-to-fact” relationship. In the above example, Joe is the “fact” and “evil” is the “false.”

The is-of-predication can have disastrous consequences at all levels of human interaction. “You’re stupid!” differs greatly from “From what you just did, I got the impression that could have done something more appropriate!”

Note that the is-of-identity and the is-of-predication can be combined in one statement. Many people assign a pejorative predication to the label “extremist” and would also (hopefully!) do the same with respect to the label “terrocrat.” So, when we say, “Joe is an extremist” or “Joe is a terrocrat,” we combine identification and predication.

Multi-Valued Logic
Korzybski described GS as a non-Aristotelian system. In addition to other fundamental differences, Aristotelian logic has two values, while “non-A” logic has multiple values. In Aristotelian logic, any proposition has only one of two values: “right” or “wrong” — white or black, without any shades of grey.

Korzybsky’s logic has multiple values — any proposition can have a range of values, expressed in terms of probabilities or degrees of qualities (shades of grey).

Because, in creating our maps, models, and words, we tend to form incomplete abstractions of the world we’re trying to interpret, usually no description, answer, model, action, or person has the simple value, “right” or “wrong.” Many factors — more than we know — usually affect or relate to every event or situation. Some factors incline us to think in one direction, some influence us in other directions. If we look at as many of these factors as we can discern, and examine their relationships, we have a better chance of finding an answer with a high probability of producing the results we seek.

This multi-valued principle applies to many different areas. Korzybsky talks about the “multi-ordinality” of terms. Not everyone assigns just one identical meaning to a particular word. To many words most people assign more than one meaning. Different people may assign different meanings to particular words in the same context, and especially in different contexts. A word or sentence in itself doesn’t say anything definite or finite; it requires an individual to assign meaning to it, and that meaning can vary considerably.

Similarly, we can think in terms of multi-valued causality. It may be naive to think that one specific thing simply causes another. Most events tend to have many causes and many effects. We live in a world of complex and wide-ranging interrelationships we may never fully understand. Albert Camus wrote that if he just lifted his finger, someone somewhere in the world might die as a result.

Additional GS FormulationsTime-binding. Korzybski described the uniquely human ability to record information in the form of written language and pass knowledge on into the future to others as “time-binding.”

Abstracting. “Abstracting” refers to how we obtain and process knowledge, how we create our maps of the territory. I’ve already indicated how the factors, (1) deletion; (2) distortion; (3) generalization; and (4) addition and hallucination, can affect the way we create our maps. We can distinguish between abstracting as directly as possible from our experience — extensional abstracting — and abstracting from “language-absent-experience” — intensional abstracting.

We can identify levels of abstraction: (1) from sensory input to pre-verbal mental map; (2) pre-verbal mental map to verbal map; (3) verbal maps of verbal maps; (4) etc. The higher the level of abstraction, the greater the risk of (1) deletion; (2) distortion; (3) generalization; and (4) addition and hallucination reducing the usefulness of the abstraction.

Many of our personal misunderstandings arise when we act as if we have all the information about anything or anyone, i.e., we act as if we abstract perfectly, which we can’t do. No two events or situations share exactly the same details, but for convenience, we may categorize them as identical or similar. Treating them as if identical — ignoring their differences — can lead to misunderstandings, conflicts, and even tragedies. Ever heard of a policeman who shot a suspect to death, because he thought the suspect had a gun when he didn’t?

Elementalism — Splitting the Territory. In our maps we often make distinctions or linguistic splits, for example, we may talk about “thoughts” and “feelings” as if they constitute separate things. But the territory may contain only inseperable “thought-feelings.” The split between thought and feeling could reflect no more than a linguistic convenience — another for us to create maps with nothing in the territory that corresponds to the map, i.e. there’s no referent.

Non-Elementalism — Not Splitting the Territory. The principle of non-elemantalism indicates that we can’t necessarily separate thinking from feeling, actions from consequences, etc. It leads to some holistic terms, such as organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment, thought-feeling, etc.

Testing by Experience. We have a self-reflexive capacity; we can observe the consequences our actions produce and learn from them. This gives us opportunities to improve our abilities to observe, to create more appropriate maps, to think more effectively, and to act more productively. We can test our inferences, evaluations, theories, value systems, etc. about philosophy, politics, psychology, economics, crime and punishment, etc. We can recognize that our verbal constructions necessarily differ from things-events. We can put our verbal inventions to the test of experience. We can ask, “Does the map fit the territory?” “Do our maps work?” “Do they produce the physical results we seek?”

Were he still alive, Korzybski would probably regard my “GS principles” as involving gross and unjustified deletions from, distortions of, generalizations of, and additions to his GS principles! Obviously, in a few pages I can only scratch the surface of GS. For more details on GS, you may want to check out the following two websites and their links to other sites:

Much of what I’ve written about GS I “extracted” from the authors on these sites and their links. I hereby offer a collective acknowledgment to you all for the contribution you’ve made to my limited understanding of GS.

E-Prime
Korzybski’s student D. David Bourland, Jr. has developed a writing style called “E-Prime,” a variant of English that simply eliminates all use of “is” and other forms of the word “to be.”

Psychotherapist Dr. Albert Ellis — referred to in the section on “Semantic Reaction” in connection with Rational Therapy and “self-suggested nonsense” — considered the benefits of E-Prime sufficient to warrant rewriting some of his books in E-Prime, including A New Guide to Rational Living with Robert A. Harper in 1975, and Anger: How to Live With and Without It in 1977.

When you have an important question or problem, you may want to do the exercise of framing it in E-Prime. You may find that when you can’t say “something is something,” you have to think much more specifically about what you mean, and just how your words relate to physical reality or actual experience, rather than just to other words.

To test the above theory, I decided to convert the entire part of this report, dealing with GS, into E-Prime. It did indeed make me think much more deeply. I experienced amazement and considerable satisfaction from the degree to which the section on “people have meanings for words” improved as a result of conversion into E-Prime — a vast, unexpected improvement!

Used in writing, E-Prime tends to tighten style by eliminating the passive voice. Without passive verbs, you need to think clearly about who or what performed the action. Rather than, “It is commonly accepted that…,” you want to know in more detail just who accepts it, the reliability of the assertion that they accept it, and possibly why or on what basis they accept it.

According to Bourland, certain questions — some would say pseudo-questions — that have uselessly preoccupied many people, cannot be asked in E-prime: “Who am I?”; “What is my destiny?”; “What is man?”; “What is woman?”; “Is it art?” Because of their semantic structure, such “questions” seldom lead to useful answers; they more usually result in confusion, disagreement, conflict, and even war.

It may be more appropriate to ask: “What characterizes me uniquely?”; “What can I do to improve my potential success in life?”; “What healthy food should I eat next?”

Forms of “to be” tend to encourage and facilitate the making of certain abbreviated statements that may convey little or no information, though we often behave as if they do. Consider such empty comments as: “It is clear that…”; “Business is business”; “It’s just semantics” — the last often used as an analysis stopper. You might productively respond, “OK. Let’s try to clarify some of those semantic problems.”

My personal view is that much of the time it works reasonably well to use “to be” — as long as we carefully notice what we say and write, and we keep reminding ourselves of the potential for introducing linguistic delusions. And, as indicated above, whenever we have a difficult question, problem, or subject to resolve or formulate, we may benefit greatly by using E-Prime.

Furthermore, I think everyone should at least get some practice in translating “to-be-writing” into E-Prime, and should write some E-Prime from scratch. This exercise will make you more aware of the difference between map and territory, and will increase your ability to use language more consciously and deliberately. It will also improve your ability to communicate in F-Prime — next section.

By “Freespeak” I mean words like “terrocrat,” specifically designed to reduce the power of terrorist bureaucrats and coercive political agents and increase the power of freedom-loving individuals. “Slavespeak” is also a “Freespeak” word.

I attempted to write this entire report in “F-Prime,” short for “Freedom-Prime” or “Free-Prime.”

2. AVOID SLAVESPEAK IN YOUR SPEAKING AND WRITING WHEN APPROPRIATE — When you say or write “government” (without the quotes), add the quotation marks mentally, or cross your fingers behind your back to remind you of the undesirability of Slavespeak.

3. ASSIST OTHERS TO CURE THEMSELVES FROM SLAVESPEAK.

We may need minimal guidelines developed for speaking and writing F-Prime.

We need more Freespeak words as powerful memes to knock out the old harmful memes of political Slavespeak.

F-Prime has an important second rule: USE STANDARD ENGLISH WHEN TALKING TO A COP WHO HAS JUST PULLED YOU OVER, OR TO ANY AUDIENCE NOT READY TO HEAR F-PRIME.

We may need further methods or techniques to prepare people for F-Prime. Reading the reports mentioned earlier will help.

Examples of F-Prime — English sentences translated into E-Prime and F-Prime
[Adapted from the Extropy Institute FAQ List.]

ENGLISH: Religious fanatics like David Koresh are dangerous. [Makes the implicit assignment “David Koresh was a religious fanatic.”]

E-PRIME: The government considered David Koresh, whose followers believed he was God, a danger to their authority. [Talks about who holds what beliefs.]

F-PRIME: Certain individual terrocrats considered David Koresh, whose followers believed he was “God” (so-called), a danger to their pretended “authority.” [The term “government,” particularly used as if a volitional entity capable of “considering,” constitutes Slavespeak at its worst, as well as constituting an aspect of participation mystique. “God” and “authority,” as used in the E-Prime translation, constitute Slavespeak.]

ENGLISH: Natalie Merchant’s voice is the most beautiful in the world.

E-PRIME: I like Natalie Merchant’s voice better than anyone else’s.

F-PRIME: I like Natalie Merchant’s voice better than anyone else’s.

ENGLISH: Natalie Merchant is a Commie dupe.

E-PRIME: Natalie Merchant has said that she regards the principle of private property as bad. [An operational statement of an observable fact regarding something somebody has said.]

F-PRIME: Natalie Merchant has said that she regards the principle of private property as bad.

EF-Prime
Writing in E-Prime and F-Prime at the same time I call “EF-Prime.”

I attempted to write the portion of this report — from the “General Semantics” heading up to “Examples of F-Prime…” — in EF-Prime.

“Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.” – Robert Anton Wilson

And it doesn’t really matter how you ended up here. The point is that you’re here.

The Garden of Resistance is for all. To explore, learn and unite.
It was created for the purpose of gathering together information, tools, articles, videos and the like into one spot, both for safe keeping and the dissemination of knowledge.

Hopefully, you find something of value here that will serve you well.
Warm Regards,